Alysha Dominico, CEO and Co-Founder of Tangible Words, does not know how to code. Four weeks ago, she began a weekly journey learn coding as an adult using Hatch@Home, and her kids are learning along with her!  

As an adult learning to code, I'm loving the option of having so many projects I can complete on the Hatch@Home platform. I find I can nerd out on it, and get lost in doing one Project after another.

4 weeks in, I have my kids coding regularly. We all still have a limited grasp on what all the coding symbols mean, but we do understand how to code colour!

Every week we get feedback on how we did on the previous project. It's great to have Hatch's Instructors to submit projects to. The Hatch Challenges help us play around with the code to investigate what we know. Inevitably we end up on Google researching, and even getting it totally wrong but having a 'go'.

For example, this week we built on our colour code knowledge and investigated how to set up random colour changes. We didn't quite get the code right. But getting it wrong is just as important because it makes us hungrier for the correct answer.

Tonight our research on this challenge took us to a video about coding random colours. We may not have got the code right, but we learned that we're learning to code in Python Coding language.

My 7 and a half year old son loves seeing our "points" rise for every project we complete. (Yes, I've got my kids coding!)

Now that the schools are closed indefinitely from COVID-19, coding on Hatch@Home is a must. As an ex-teacher, I can see how he is getting good literacy and math skills practice.

Here are some videos of us coding together in this week's session. What we now know:

1. How to parse out sections of code

Bailey chose to do a Project that makes static appear like white noise. Here's how we went from Project idea to figuring out how to code it.

 See the video in full screen

2. Developing confidence with code - and referring to what you previously learned

Bailey shows his delight in making the static move and tells us how he has learned to change the colour - and shows you how too!

See the video full screen.

Follow along on Alysha's mult-week coding bootcamp: learning to code online.

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