A couple of days ago my girls suddenly decided to learn coding.
Like most of the things they show an interest in, coding became an immediate obsession and for the past couple of days we’ve been writing Python on the Raspberry Pi, my phone, a laptop and a micro:bit. We’ve made an adventure games, a racing game, a version of Snake with LEDs (on the micro:bit). We’ve learned about variables and loops and inputs and graphics.
Much of unschooling involves bouncing around from one thing to another; sometimes sticking with something for a long time; sometimes picking it up and dropping it overnight (or even more quickly). One of the hardest things about this way of learning is letting go of pre-conceived ideas of how we learn or how we think we should learn. We expect to commit to something and see it through.
But the coding example is a reminder that switching around is never wasted: even a brief introduction to something—a passing glance—is enough to bury something in their consciousnesses for later use. The coding interest didn’t come from nowhere: we’ve had a Raspberry Pi for years; we’ve got computers and other computing devices and Arduino and micro:bit. Plus I’m interested in coding. I can do a bit myself.
I’ve taken the girls to technology events, and we’ve played with Scratch. We even built a couple of simple websites when they wanted to try that. But it never stuck. For one reason or another it didn’t spark anything and they dropped it.
I don’t know how long they’ll be interested in coding this time and it really doesn’t matter. However long they pursue it it’s both something to be an enjoyed and a means to an end: they want to do something and they’ve decided that coding might be the way to do it. They’ve dredged up something from their brains and found a new use for it.
But it’s also pure discovery. Many people who have been working for years—many “grown-ups”—still have no idea what they’re really interested in, or what they want to do as a career.
It’s hard work to find what excites you. It’s probably even harder to do that when you get older and you’ve only ever really known one path. So if you can’t use your childhood as pure discovery, rather than making a choice and sticking with it then when can you do it?
That discovery means freedom to pick up and drop things; freedom to try things on for size and decide whether they’re really for you. To the outsider—and particularly the outsider with very different life experiences—it sometimes looks like a lack of engagement. But it’s quite the opposite.