Computer Science

Just when I thought we had a bit of a schedule in place, we decided to add a whole new course of study. So I shaved 10 minutes off of each subject and shortened our previously leisurely lunch, and now Casia has a chance to learn all about computing.

She started showing an interest when a good friend of ours pointed her in the direction of a program called Scratch. It's a programming language developed by a group at MIT to make it easy for kids to create their own games, art and animations. Casia has been using it to create games for her brother and friends to play. From a layman's prospective, it seems like a great way to get a child interested in programming in a free, user friendly way. 

Naturally, when she'd run into a computer question, Casia didn't come to me. She'd head straight to the software engineer in the family, her daddy. She was getting comfortable with most of the functions, but she was running into problems of not being able to do specific things she wanted or having to repetitively add the same element over and over again. When she'd approach Jacob for help, he was very frustrated because he thought it was a very limited tool and felt like she should just learn a more useful programming language. After a few weeks of these discussions, he finally convinced her that she should learn some programming basics.

Thus, the new course of Computer Science has been added. Fortunately, this class is handled entirely by Jacob. He spends his lunch hour giving instructions. He does the planning, gives the tests, and assigns the homework. Casia couldn't be happier about all this. She loves learning how it all works. And I think she really loves having her daddy involved in her homeschooling. It's a great opportunity to learn from a different teacher with different strengths. It also gives her a greater understanding of what Jacob does for work. And Jacob is doing a great job. He's breaking it down for her and making it fun; it's no wonder it's become one of her favorite classes. I'm so proud of them both!