Drew, the voice behind the popular BenSparks Family Adventure blog, is a father of two who describes himself as a “big damned kid.” He got his first computer at age 10. It was a TI99/TA, and he used to record thousands of lines of code-- on audio tape!-- just to make a tiny 8x8 bit character move a little.
One of his college roommates in 1996 was a computer science major and with his help, Drew learned to make websites. “This was before the days when GeoCities went big,” he said.
Since then, he’s worked as a coder at a number of places and always in tech. So, it makes sense that he was pretty comfortable when diving into the Code Car Kit with his daughter, Eva, 13.
“I was really excited to get it because I want to teach the kids how to code and this seems like one of the coolest things out there for that,” he said.
“I tried it out myself, first,” he said. “Hooked it up to my laptop and then went downstairs and installed it on the family computer and showed it to Eva.”
Pretty soon, Eva, who her dad says likes to do things herself, told her dad that she wanted to play around with it and sent him on his way. But every once in while she’d call out, “Dad, come look what I did!”
EVA ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT AND EVEN CAME HOME THE NEXT DAY AFTER SCHOOL THINKING ABOUT THE CHALLENGES AND TRIED AGAIN.
Drew said, “She is thrilled with it and has been using it ever since.”
“My kids have it so lucky because with the Let’s Start Coding app they can learn the basic functions and concepts of coding and see the results of their learning immediately on the Code Car,” Drew said.
Eva is a creative kid, very into STEAM toys. She loves Harry Potter and Percy Jackson books, and she’s just started getting into Tiny Dungeon, a role-playing game for kids. Other toys Eva and Drew are into right now include Artie 3000-- a robot that draws based on code and can be controlled with code as simple as Blockly. Right now, she’s programming it to make simple shapes. She also likes LEGO Boost.
How do we know that Drew and Eva are a success story? When Drew went to Eva’s school’s Christmas party, this past December, he told her computer class teacher about her work with the Let’s Start Coding Code Car. Eva was so enthusiastic about it that her teacher asked her to demonstrate the Car to her classmates during Hour of Code. She walked them through a couple of the online lessons and showed off some of the things she could make the car do using C++ code-- flash the lights, honk the horn, blare the siren.
“With several projects, challenges and quizzes to go through, your kids will get a ton of enjoyment and learning from this,” Drew said. “The really fun stuff happens when your kids try to change the code on their own to make the car do things you hadn’t thought of before.”
Eva has moved on to the Let’s Start Coding Ultimate Kit 2 alongside building stuff in Minecraft, her current obsession.
Drew said Eva’s access to computer learning at school is limited to “a little bit a week.” Neither of the kids has been working with coding much, so he wanted to give Eva’s skills a boost outside of school. Drew is a big fan of Let’s Start Coding and other educational toys because they give his kids the opportunity to amp up their STEAM skills under the guise of play. He said sometimes you just “click” with a product, and for Eva, the Code Car just “clicked.”
