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Discussion on: It's Never Too Late To Learn: 3 things my 11yo taught me about coding

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thorners55 profile image
Stephanie 🌞

This article is great. I love how enthusiastic your son is, and how you're enthusiastic about learning with him.

It also strikes me quite personally - I wish I had had someone there when I was younger to encourage me to go from tinkering with code into actionable learning, as your bio says. As an 11-13y/o, I started to tweak my MySpace profile's HTML and create some personalised Bebo skins. I was good at it and enjoyed doing it, but never realised it was possible to do more than that, or that I was capable of it. As an adult, I realised I COULD, so jumped straight into a coding bootcamp, which I recently completed and loved it.

It makes me feel so good that there's someone out there helping people find this path! Thank you for sharing this story!

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nitya profile image
Nitya Narasimhan, Ph.D

Thank you so much!!

And I agree. Not just as a parent but as someone who looks back on her childhood and thinks "what if I had started learning this then?" And I absolutely appreciate what you say - I try to give back as much as I can. But I also know my 11yo has privileges that other kids don't and I hope that by us all sharing stories, other parents realize how much their kids are capable of as well.

The truth is that kids emulate parents and the adults they observe around them. All the time. And they are made for curiosity and play. If we see them and appreciate their efforts, they can (and do) flourish.