Times Table Hack Stars

17 Dec 2023

Time will tell if this was good parenting or not. Finn has been saying he’s interested in coding. We’ve enjoyed building games together (he loves setting up cheat codes in the little scripts). It seems to work best if I code and commentate: although he likes getting the machine to do his bidding, the details don’t seem so interesting to him.

Anyway, Finn has also been obsessed of late with an online times table challenge shared at school. We sat and looked at an (assumed) architecture diagram of a data-driven website, and had an chat about ethical hacking. We decided it was ok to fiddle the game to get high scores, but not to post them online in the (semi) competitive parts of the site.

Then we set about injecting a little bit of JavaScript (all local, just for fun) and let the quad-core multi-GHz CPU rip on some two-digit multiplication problems. Finn’s eyes lit up when he grasped the idea that writing a loop could ram up the points even faster than repeatedly pounding the “up”/“Enter” keys to run the same line of code over and over.

Passed a fun couple of hours and got the Christmas holidays off to a good start!

Tags: personal, geeky, family

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