Habit Making

Was reading something really interesting the other day… about turning something into a habit.

A good thing – like playing an instrument or exercising or learning something new. To do this you have to do it every single day for 66 days – and then it becomes a habit.

Sounds like an incredibly long time to have to do something – but actually it’s really only two months. And it’s not like you have to do it all day every day either.

This is what he suggested.

Make a calendar – a real one on some paper – draw 66 blocks and number each block.

Schedule a time each day to do your stuff – say from 2.30 in the afternoon to 3pm. You can plan for whenever it suits you and for as long or as short as you like.

Each day, when you have worked on your project for the allocated amount of time, you put a nice big X in the appropriate block. After a while, when you see all those X’s you start feeling even more motivated.

I’ve decided that I am going to try this system. I want to learn to code.

Code? I hear you say… What’s that?  Can kids really code?

YES! Kids can code. All over the world, children are learning to code.

All those computer games that get played and the animations that you watch on the computer are done using coding.

Coding is the language that gets used to instruct things to do something on the computer.

A simple example… you want a cartoon of a dog to move forward to the middle of the screen, hop up and down and bark. There’s a sequence of instructions that need to be attached to that particular picture to make it do this. This is called coding.

Years ago it used to be rather hard to do this and you needed to have the right aptitude and mind-set to be able to code. Nowadays things are simpler.

There is a program called “Scratch” (developed by MIT Media Lab) which makes it really easy. It’s called “visual programming” and once you’ve got the hang of how it works – it’s fun galore!

Best of all – it’s FREE. People all over the world are using it, so you can interact with them and get help if you need it.

Here’s the website address – https://scratch.met.edu

Go crack some coding!

Sibo

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *