Copasetic Flow

While I was out of town for work, the gang—7 y.o. No. One, 5 y.o. No. Two, and 3 y.o. No. Three—continued their CSFirst work with my partner.  Google cleverly refers to CSFirst as a club.  No. One took it a step further and decided the club was in fact a camp, you know, like summer camp.  One decided that as a camp they of course needed a banner, and went to work. I heard during the day that the gang had worked together to set up One’s sandbox—the web app where CSFirst students do their programming work. I also heard that they were pair-programming; I’m a huge fan of pair-programming, so I was excited to get home last night to find out how everything went. NOTE:  For those who aren’t into programming in general, or agile programming methodologies in particular, pair-programming is the practice of two programmers sitting down at one screen to work on a piece of code.  As one programmer types, the other checks their work.  They both discuss ideas for the...

The gang—7 y.o. No. 1, 5 y.o. No. 2, and 3 y.o. No. 3—and I received our materials for our CSFirst computer club from Google in the mail last week!  Google had indicated it might take as many as three weeks for the materials to arrive, but I suppose since we’re only 40 miles or so from Google headquarters, the materials arrived in a few days.  If you haven’t heard of CSFirst yet, it’s a program from Google to teach kids how to program. We’re trying out the Music and Sound theme.  With a group of kids, some of whom aren’t reading yet, this seemed the better choice for us.  I’m hoping the outcome of the programming activities will be aural output each member of the gang can appreciate on their own.  Also, one of the activities is a dance party.  Everyone in the gang loves a good dance party as evidenced by the number of times we’ve watched Xanadu in the last seven years. When it arrived last week, we dug through our box of materials.  There was...

A few weeks ago, we went to a friend’s birthday party at a water park.  After we’d gained admission to the park, five year-old No. Two was promptly nowhere to be seen. “Have you seen Two?” I asked my partner. “Nope.” So, off to look I went.  Fortunately, the water park had a rather compact design.  There was the splash area, a full sized pool for swimmers, and those learning to swim, and a collection of seven or so water slides, all fed by the same three story tall set of stairs and platforms.  I knew Two wasn’t in the splash area because that’s where we were.  As I meandered between the big pool and the slides, I caught a flash of Two’s ultra-blonde mop of hair out of the corner of my eye and way up. In disbelief, I looked up the water slide tower to see if I had really spotted Two.  I had to wait a few moments, but I caught a glimpse of him again.  He was at the entrance to the slides on a platform thirty feet up in the air.  He’d line...