Lily Maxwell & Kyle Maxwell: Teaching Kids to Code and Hack

well if i could program why can't people oth other people's program so i was thinking that maybe um if i can program you can program so if a fourth grader can do it why can't like a trained adult do it i mean it's pretty easy so what did we get you uh super scratch programming adventure in python for kids python for kids that amazes me now i just have a few comments i really paid for and i'm like oh no we like these books so so tell me what do you do with these books was it just like lines of code to type in or was it more than that it was more where you could like make different graphics

it has different things from different movies or books like indiana jones star wars and and it's like a mini comic book teaches you how to program at the same time a couple years ago she went to a day camp at her school during the summer where she was working on some invention it was basically for teaching kids to be inventors and so forth during all of that she became really interested in electronics so my how old was she eight years old came home and we started collecting capacitors from disassembling um electronics so we gave her to disassemble but uh you know she wanted to take him apart properly not just the traditional kids way right um so

you know she we so as we joke she comes from a long line of geeks so when what was interesting was so i'm more of a software guy she was more interested in hardware and doing some of both actually so this started really with her basically saying dad i want to do more of this i was a little intimidated i hadn't worked with hardware in close to 20 years at that at least at that intricate level so it was kind of a learning process for both of us honestly if you um program you can do a lot more in life and it helps you a lot and like if your family is poor and you

come from someone like your family is for maybe you can develop something just a little bit you can save up your money to develop something and then maybe you can change the world and change your family's new history that's coming up like the next generation so i've been coming to um besides here in dallas for a few years now this is the first time i brought her with me and i go to besides around the country actually and one of the things that interested me when she when i know she's it was kind of an idea that we both had because she's been she participates in some of the other local community hacker groups with me and she's always

wanting to do more and be and feel like she's really part of it because you know there's no reason that she can't be so um the thing that besides is largely about participation and it's and it's very community driven it's certainly not corporate driven at all and so because of that i felt like it was a pretty good fit for what is essentially participation from certainly someone who's not a professional uh we got great encouragement from the b-side coordinators who are fortunately for us i guess friends of mine as well and so from that it kind of grew grew naturally she wanted to do it they told her to go ahead and do it and we've

worked the last few months to make it happen i would change the fact that there are more boys and men programming here and maybe more girls can get into it like it's the other way around in school volunteering girls do 98 hint of volunteering and men do barely any but then they have the watchdog programs which i'm really interested in and then now they have b-sides which i saw very few girls here but there were a lot but there were a little bits so i was thinking maybe more girls could start programming it would be a lot more fun and more comfortable for people who speak in their girl and they're maybe my age because i'm

the youngest speaker here

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