I firmly believe that to stick with programming it has to seem fun from the get-go. I have seen lots of prospective students give up whether at the hobbyist level or at the college level simply because the assignments they are told to make are boring and frumpy. I don’t think anyone really has fun staring at some boring text examples in a black box on a computer screen! These are great for expressing concepts to students in a time efficient way, but unless you can foster your creativity with something visual that can intrigue you enough to want to show it off and feel pride in what you’ve made, programming won’t grab you.

Learning carpentry just to cut boards into three by three squares would be a very boring way to learn! Make a birdhouse instead or perhaps a nice chess set. Very much like programming you can make something practical like a box or something whimsical and just for fun like a catapult.

Throughout our learning together I will have multiple examples of different visual and interesting projects you can follow along with. These projects will be from a diverse set of things you can make with your new coding skills. From cell phone mobile apps 📱 to web pages 💻 to native games 🎮 to more in between, hopefully together we can find something to spark your interest enough to tinker and create on your own!

It’s totally okay to fail. It’s totally okay to do something totally wrong as long as you are learning. It took me many years when I was a kid to start making anything resembling good code! No matter what, though, I was proud of what I made, and I had fun, so I kept going.

You can finish your projects, or not. You can stick with the same area of learning, or not. If you were trying to learn how to be an artist I wouldn’t lock you in a room with a pencil forever and make you just draw portraits. Taking in a big range of experience is more important and the best way to get there is to just keep failing until it feels right.

First we’re going to make a project just to get you set up and so you can see that all it takes to make something is a little bit of time and effort. Don’t fret if the setup is a bit confusing since you only have to do it once, and I’m sure you can ask around or Google your way to fixing it. There’s no time limit!

After that we’ll go over some basics and then the sky's the limit!

It’s more important for you to look at concepts over specific language-y things about code. Try to understand everything I show you but it’s okay if some things are vague.

Mastery comes from time. There’s no shortcut to years of experience. Stay creative.