Developers come from all walks of life. However, I want to talk about learning to code with young children, and the challenges of juggling parenting and studying.

My background

I’m not a conventional candidate for becoming a web developer. I went down a humanities route and I have no computer science background. I fell into a career in Higher Education and for over a decade I moved up the ranks in administration. I enjoyed my work but wasn’t fulfilled by my career choice.

About seven years ago in search for a new career path, I sought advice to get into a more technical role. So I started learning the web fundamentals like HTML and CSS. My first attempt at coding was half-hearted. Fear was the main reason. I feared that the transition would take too long. I also got distracted by my upcoming wedding.

6 years later…one husband, a flat, and two babies under two!

I had my first baby in January 2015. In a nutshell, having my son was a shock to the system and completely turned my world upside down. The sleep deprivation felt like torture and I had difficulty with breastfeeding. I was in a zombie state for the first six months.

As things started to settle down, I found out that I was pregnant…again. This was during my first week back at work! My daughter was born in September 2016. Now I had two babies under twenty months!

Realization, motivation and career change

By mid 2017 at the age of 34, I decided to leave my job. I did this for two reasons. It was no longer financially viable for me to work and have my children in childcare. It was difficult to work full-time, while looking after two young children with a husband who worked away a lot.

The thoughts I had seven years earlier never went away. I could wait until the children were older and start to look for part-time work, or to finally pursue a job in tech. My husband, who already works in the tech industry, gave me the same advice.

Learn the fundamentals: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. With a combination of these three skill sets I knew I could become a front-end developer.

freeCodeCamp and the start of my coding journey

I researched which online learning platform I should follow. I read good things about freeCodeCamp. I also liked the structure of the curriculum. It was suitable for anyone with zero programming experience.

When I started, it was very satisfying seeing my code render in the preview pane! I thought to myself, “this isn’t so bad, I can do this”. I remember the first time I got stuck.

It was on a <div> tag. I read in the exercise instructions: “The div element is probably the most commonly used HTML element of all.” I didn’t understand why you would nest a <div> in a <div>?!

My husband said “Google is your friend” and so I started researching to understand what a <div> was.

It wasn’t easy. I had not studied for over 13 years and I was also going into a subject area that was so far removed from anything I had learned before. Early on, I had a lot of self-doubt and feared that I couldn’t learn to program. But as time went by, the process of learning programming got easier. I worked hard and persevered.

Although the curriculum became more difficult, I got more used to feeling uncomfortable.

A typical evening of multitasking! Putting my daughter to sleep and doing the chores.

The challenges of learning how to code with children

Being a parent is a “job” that never stops. It’s the most demanding role I’ve ever had! I have to be the best chef, entertainer, housekeeper, singer, nurse, nurturer, errand runner, teacher and storyteller… the list goes on. Even when my children are asleep, I’m on standby, ready to drop everything to tend their needs.

With that in mind, finding time to code was the biggest challenge. My husband worked away and for the most of the week I was in charge of two toddlers. It was exhausting! At the beginning I could only code after they were asleep.

A typical day with children would start at 6 am and last until 8 pm. It would be about 9 pm before I could sit down, open my laptop and start coding. Even though I felt tired, when I started to code I felt revitalized by it.

Some evenings were better than others. Depending on the needs of my children, I managed to study anywhere between 30 minutes and three hours before bed. Quite often, I wasn’t able to study at all.

Bear with me, it does get better.

Eventually, coding became part of my routine. I studied more on days when my children were in nursery. On my “free” days, I structured my day like so:

6 am: Breakfast, time with the children
9 am: Studying
12 pm: Lunch and housework
1 pm: Continue studying
3 pm: Cook, more housework and pick up children
9 pm: Study some more
10/11 pm: sleep

When you have children, illness is inevitable. But no-one told me how often babies get sick! It was a big disruption to my coding journey. Here’s an example.

During the winter of 2017, my daughter got the flu and my son soon after. It took two weeks for them to recover. As I finally relaxed and was no longer in “survival mode”, my husband and I got sick. I wasn’t able to study for over a month.

I learned to be prepared for disruptions like this and not allow it to have a major impact on my motivation. I would try to get back to studying as soon as possible. I started off with short periods of coding and built it up once I got back into the flow.

I tried to keep to a routine as much as possible. It wasn’t only important for me, but also my children. For example, this meant having to stop studying in the middle of solving an exercise to pick up my children. Not coding into the early hours of the morning so I could be ready for my children the next day.

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Lessons Learned

I was asked recently what are the most important things I have learned on my coding journey. I’ve listed my top tips. Some of them are specific to parents, but I’m sure they would still be useful to any non-parents!

1. Anyone can learn to code: no matter what your background, if you have the interest and motivation, you can learn to code. There are so many resources online that cater to all levels of knowledge. All you need is access to a computer and time to learn. Practice makes perfect!

2. Code every day: a tip I picked up from Quincy from freeCodeCamp, but it’s so important! I try to stick to this but don’t beat yourself up if you don’t manage to. The unpredictable nature of children meant that this wasn’t always possible for me. I tried to adapt my coding life around my responsibilities and commitments. Learning how to be flexible was key.

3. Don’t wear yourself down: try to have some time to relax and switch off from studying. I try to go to the gym.

4. Multitasking: The days when my children are in nursery, I group all my housework to that time. I would code while the laundry was washing. Watch a coding related video on YouTube or listen to a podcast while I was cleaning or cooking. I also cook meals in bulk and freeze them to free up more time during the weekend.

5. Learn to manage your fear: Don’t allow your negativity to consume you. At some point in your coding journey you’re going to feel self-doubt. Everyone has their own coping mechanisms. Personally, the more I studied and practiced, the more I grew in confidence.

6. Learning how to research: this is an important skill to master. At the beginning I found it difficult to search for the correct key words to help me with my tasks. Again, it’s all about practice. The more you search online, the better you’ll become. Remember to bookmark useful sites.

7. Don’t get overwhelmed: it’s good to think about where your coding journey will take you. But don’t let it overwhelm you. Think of your knowledge as a bell curve. In the middle of the graph where it peaks, you’ll know two languages or frameworks very well. As it tapers off, your knowledge on other subjects will not be as extensive. It’s always good to be aware of new technologies and trends, but it doesn’t mean you have to be an expert!

8. Build a portfolio: you can still build a good portfolio without “work” experience. My portfolio consists of projects from freeCodeCamp. You don’t even need to setup your own environment and can use online resources like CodePen to demo your code.

9. Version Control: learn how to use Git and GitHub. As you start to do more complex projects, you’ll need to use an IDE (integrated development environment). I use Atom but don’t focus too much on the tool. Choose one and become good at using it! Start creating repositories and committing your code to Github.

10. Code review: it’s important to find someone to help you code review your projects. It was difficult for me do this at the beginning. But ultimately, it will lead you to become a better programmer. You’ll learn a lot by reviewing other people’s code as well.

11. Never stop learning: another thing people ask me is when I’ll stop studying. My answer is never. There is so much innovation in web development. I want to be aware of the latest updates and the “must have skills”.

Where I am now

I have been learning and coding for about a year, part time. I’ve completed three out of six certificates from freeCodeCamp.

I am now freelancing as a web developer and I have built two commercial websites. One for a client and my portfolio. I have one client I’m working with now to redesign and build their website. I’m also continuing my studies with freeCodeCamp and other platforms such as Udemy.

Final thoughts

Some people asked why I did a career change with children and not before when I had more time. This is the irony: I didn’t appreciate or realize how important time was. I was also complacent and scared of taking the plunge before children. I want to be a good example for my children and have a career which I’m passionate about.

When I became a parent, I felt like my sole purpose was to be a mother and I had lost my own identity in the process. When I started studying again, it gave me a purpose outside of parenting. I didn’t have to be a coder or mum, I could be both.

If you have any questions or just want to say hello, find me on Twitter @PhoebeVF

It’s Wednesday evening. My two sons and daughter are ready. I press play and we start a journey that takes us all farther than we ever anticipated.

We watched the first episode of Gravity Falls. The visuals, characters, plot and humor are top notch and we definitely wanted more but… we spotted something at the end of credits. Something we didn’t expect. Something that made watching this series far more interesting and engaging.

An encrypted message.

Here’s how we deciphered the codes. And we had a great fun doing this on our own. Without checking any of this in the internet. If I’ve caught your interest, I recommend you to stop reading and try doing this yourself. Then you can come back and read my solutions and explanations below later.

ZHOFRPH WR JUDYLWB IDOOV

We were certain this was a message. By the looks of it I was guessing that it’s encrypted with some kind of substitution cipher.

Encrypting using substitution cipher basically substitutes letters with other letters based on some general rule. Decrypting is done by applying this rule in reverse to encrypted text. This kinds of ciphers are not used anymore because they are easy to break i.e. with cryptoanalysis. You can find more details on this wiki page.

At first we were too excited about the story to focus on the ciphers just yet. We just acknowledged that the ciphers exist and we didn’t know how to decrypt them. I thought we would just break them later but…

After one episode my son had an idea. He wanted to watch show intro. Backwards. I thought why not ? Guess what! When you watch it backwards at some point you can hear hidden message:

Three letters back

Hmm… three letters back. Normally this would’t make any sense. But we had ciphers which we didn’t know how to decode. For us this made perfect sense.

Hello Mr. Caesar

The Caesar cipher is one of the earliest known and simplest ciphers. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is ‘shifted’ a certain number of places down the alphabet. For example, with a shift of 1, A would be replaced by B, B would become C, and so on. The method is named after Julius Caesar, who apparently used it to communicate with his generals. Read more here.

I printed english alphabet for everyone from here and decrypting started:

Z → W because if we move 3 letters back from Z we end up with W
H → E
…
B→ Y because if we move 1 letter back we end up on A and the next 2 we have to count from the end of alphabet so in the end it’s Y

After a while we knew that ZHOFRPH WR JUDYLWB IDOOV is actually WELCOME TO GRAVITY FALLS.

My kids loved it.

When they were manually decrypting next messages I thought that this is great opportunity to actually show them what I’m doing at work. In the way it’s easier for them to understand.

I started new Swift Playground because it’s offering awesome way for working with code. And started coding. I wrote this just for fun so please don’t judge ?:

When manual decoding was done I sit down with my children in front of a computer. I explained that my code is doing the same things they were doing when decrypting messages. But instead of doing this manually it’s automatic and can used many times. They didn’t understood the code, I would be surprised if they did, but I’m pretty sure they got the idea.

KZKVI QZN WRKKVI HZBH: “ZFFTSDCJTSTZWHZWFS!”

Everything was great until episode 7. We started decoding first word and:
KZKVI → HWHSF
Oh-oh, our luck just run out. It was clear that cipher has changed. Luckily there was a clue in message we did decrypt for episode 6 :

MR. CEASARIAN WILL BE OUT NEXT WEEK MR. ATBASH WILL SUBSTITUTE

Ceasar cipher → Atbash cipher

Hello Mr. Atbash

The Atbash cipher is a substitution cipher with a specific key where the letters of the alphabet are reversed. I.e. all ‘A’s are replaced with ‘Z’s, all ‘B’s are replaced with ‘Y’s, and so on. It was originally used for the Hebrew alphabet, but can be used for any alphabet. Read more here. Atbash encrypted strings can be found even in a Bible. You can read a bit more about this in here.

This time it was a bit more time consuming because we had to check character index from beginning and then find letter with this index counted from the end of alphabet. Again my kids were decrypting this manually:
K → P because index of K is 11 and when we count 11 from the end of alphabet we get P
Z → A
K → P
V → E
I → R
KZKVI → PAPER This made sense again.

After a few minutes my daughter approached me and asked whether she decrypted the message properly. She did. But this wasn’t most interesting. I noticed that she wrote something on the printed alphabet page. Above the alphabet indexes 1, 2, 3, …, 26 she added reversed index numbers 26, 25, 24, …, 1.

Thanks to this she didn’t have to count from the end of alphabet anymore. We, programmers, call this optimization. I was amazed that she already started to improve her toolset to make job easier.
Again I prepared small piece of code that was able to decode the messages:

14–5–24–20 21–16: “6–15–15–20–2–15–20 20–23–15: 7–18–21–14–11–12–5'19 7–18–5–22–5–14–7–5”

All was good until episode 14. Then out of the blue cipher changed again. We didn’t get any clue this time. Or maybe just missed it?

Well… maybe not exactly without any clue. The greatest number in ciphered text was 24 smallest was 2. Alphabet letters has indexes from 1 to 26. Based on this we made educated guess that:
1 → A
2 → B
…
26 → Z

When 14–5–24–20 decoded to NEXT we knew that our assumption was correct.

It was a bit more annoying because I didn’t want to strip the message from any characters when decoded. If it doesn’t work for you — please remove unsupported non-aplhanumeric-characters or add currently unsupported characters to .replacingOccurrences. Like I said. Don’t judge ?

5–19–23–6–21–16 18–9–6 4–16–19 22–12–15–10–20–19–25–19

We failed again when we tried to decrypt first word from message from episode 20.
5–19–23–6–21–16 → ESWFUP

Cipher changed. But we didn’t give up easily. Hint there is an , encryptedclue, that says how to decode this message. But I’m leaving this to you. It’s just too much fun to work on this stuff.

Please note that this series has two seasons filled with mysteries and encrypted messages. You won’t get bored.

The end?

Now when I know that my children like to play with cryptography I have a few ideas on thenext step. Definitely it’s not the last time they were working with ciphers and encrypted messages.

Thanks for reading! I hope that I was able to interest you a bit with this. If you actually try this with your kids please add a comment about it. I’m very curious whether it was as fun to you as it was for us.

“In the places I go there are things that I see

That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.

I’m telling you this ‘cause you’re one of my friends.

My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!”

So begins the journey of Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell into the world of code, the alphabet beyond the alphabet. Written in 1955, there is no direct mention of programming in Dr. Seuss’ On Beyond Zebra, of course, but it is clear in its message that staying locked within comfortable knowledge is a recipe for a boring and unfulfilled life.

As a universal message, this is one for academics, scientists, writers, and everyone else whose job involves expanding their understanding of the world. I heartily recommend the book to these people, but today, I’m recommending it to developers and technologists as well.

Read it with your children. Discuss with them the importance of exploration. But in particular, make clear the parallels with what you do as a hobby, for a living, or for a passion. Not only will it pay dividends for decades to come, but it will help to build a healthy respect for the utility of technology and the beauty of the humanities.

What On Beyond Zebra is about

For those of you who have not had the pleasure — or need a refresher — On Beyond Zebra relates the story of young Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell discovering a new branch of knowledge through the Narrator’s cavalier assertion that he would never be so boring as to stop at “Z” when he had reached the “end” of the alphabet.

The Narrator explains that there are letters beyond “Z,” which allow one to spell the sorts of words that one finds in Dr. Seuss’ books, such as Glikker and Floob-Boober-Bab-Boober-Bubs.

As the narrator drags Conrad from imaginary land to imaginary land, he shows him the incredible beasts and contraptions that they would have missed without the letters Glikk and Floob and more. After all this, the Narrator leaves Conrad back at the school’s blackboard where he found him, inventing his own new letter, A-Z erased and left long behind.

Sharing the exploration

The other day, I looked in the rear-view mirror on the way to karate and asked my almost-five-year-old daughter if she knew what I was doing on my computer when I worked at home. She shrugged and said no. I decided it was time to tell her anyway.

I am in the midst of a major undertaking: learning to code from scratch, having not touched a computer in that way since I endured a QuickBasic class in middle school.

Starting with HTML5 and CSS, I am working my way through JavaScript, and plan to finish the rest of Free Code Camp’s Full Stack Development certification.

By training, though, I am an historian and a Classicist, meaning that, though I have never directly made money with what I learned in school, I find pleasure in drawing together disparate pieces of information and seeing how they inform each other.

So when I read this story of a boy who has his whole world opened up past its previous boundaries, I had an instant flashback to the first time that I wrote a piece of basic HTML and refreshed my browser to see an incarnation of that code appear there as if by magic, somehow transformed from the obtuse, alchemical equation in my text editor to the beautiful (to me), clean text, images, and links that now sat before me in shining Chrome.

How sad it would have been, to have missed that moment, just because my world was never expanded beyond the everyday constraints of A-Z to the new, exotic letters of and

I sat down and read them On Beyond Zebra on a rainy afternoon in June. We had gotten it from the library on a whim, since we had already read through most of the Seuss canon, because as a parent, most children’s books are honestly not that fun to read, but the good Doctor’s are.

As we made our way through, enjoying the wordplay, rhythm, and meter (me) and striking illustrations (my daughters), I began to see a razor sharp argument for teaching children that there are always new fields of study and new worlds that lie beyond their current knowledge. And that is when I made the connection to code.

As our children grow and technology becomes increasingly unavoidable, it becomes essential to ensure that they inherit the digital world with open eyes and full understanding. They must not only understand on an intellectual level that they can push the envelope forward into unexplored territories, but also on a practical level know how to use the technologies that make this possible.

The danger comes when they approach technology simply as magic — not as a complicated, incredible ecosystem that is driven by the interplay of hardware and software. If we can stave off the lazy assumption of magic, our children can live more productive, interconnected, and ultimately, safer lives.

The talk

“Well, would you like to know what I’m doing?”

“Sure.”

“You know when we read the Fancy Nancy books, and there is one person who writes the words that we read and one person who draws the pictures that we look at?”

“Yeah.”

“You know those apps that you play on my phone or mommy’s phone? Or on an iPad? Like Toca House?”

“Yup.”

“Well, it’s a similar idea. There are people who draw all the pictures you see and touch, but then there are also people who write the languages that make those pictures move, or something happen when you touch the screen. And that’s what I’m doing. I’m not really even working yet, it’s more like I’m in school, learning those languages so I can write apps like that.”

Silence.

“Does that make sense?”

“Yes. Can I have a pretzel?”

“Yes, but only one, it’s almost time for dinner.”

For an almost-five-year-old, I’ll count that as a win.

Learning (and teaching) the new literacy

Coding is the new literacy. Software is seeping into every corner of our lives — often much faster than we as a culture can appreciate. The way that we communicate with machines, and the way those machines connect us to other people, is becoming increasingly vital.

There have been initiatives to help our children come through the education system having a better understanding of the STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) disciplines, and many universities have worked to expand those departments, sometimes at the expense of other “less profitable” ones.

I find the hubris in the “technology-first” movement terrifying, as it could mean a loss of the culture that has led us to where we are today. And this is where I found inspiration in a children’s book from 1955.

The beauty of children’s literature is its simplicity. At their best, children’s books read like good code. They take a concept, an idea, an entire worldview, and they present it in a way that is clean and clear and simple.

And much of that beauty is how, within a constrained vocabulary, those ideas shine through and spark something in every mind — whether young or old — and inspire comprehension and creativity.

This is where our children need to understand that with code, as with the “everyday” letters of A-Z, they can create any world in their imagination. They can solve any problem, and enact their wills upon the world in breathtaking way.

Software serves as the raw material of the future. Creativity will shape it into something that isn’t just functional, but beautiful. Thus, the liberal arts are a key component for helping children grow up to be healthy, sane members of society who can engage culture and society as intelligently as they engage problem solving, and the next wave of technology that stands poised to wash over us.

Don’t stop at Z

I haven’t yet started a follow-up to the conversation with my daughter, but I know now that continuing to educate her and her sister on what is happening when I’m on my computer with those funny symbols and words is going to be as important as any language. In the meantime, I will continue to read them as many Dr. Seuss and other books as I can, to ensure that when they start interacting with technology, they have the intellect and vocabulary to understand it.

While the narrator never looks down on Conrad for learning the alphabet, he’s clear in his astonishment that Conrad would have thought it acceptable to stop at “Z.” And so, the book and the subsequent conversation with my daughter became the inspiration for this article, and also for my new blog “On Beyond Z”which will focus on providing resources to help expose children to the worlds beyond our basic alphabet.

I aim to be a resource for parents and educators to help children find their way through this brave new world, so that the coming generations will be the first where significant portions of the population will grow up knowing the basics of programming as well as all of the cultural touchstones that shape our society.

And, even if technology wasn’t what he had in mind, Dr. Seuss was an advocate for helping children break out of the bounds of the A-Z alphabet and find their own way into the future.

What else is education for, if not to expand the mind to new possibilities, across all spectra?

As Dr. Seuss says:

“I led him around and I tried hard to show

There are things beyond Z that most people don’t know.

I took him past Zebra. As far as I could.

And I think, perhaps, maybe I did him some good…”

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