Just Add Imagination

I met a 12-year old programmer yesterday. He was on a field trip to the Microsoft Technology Center in Chicago with his middle school. He'd brought a USB storage stick with a program he'd written on it to show us. What he had written was a very cool web browser. He told me it included about 20,000 lines of C# code.

He demonstrated the program for the group and I have to say he impressed a lot of people. This web browser had the features you would expect such as tabbed browsing but it had a lot of features I'd never thought about. For example it was a simple menu option to have the program look up the ownership of a domain using whois. And there were other options to get other bits of information about the web site as well. Frankly there was too much to see in a short period of time for me to absorb it all. I gave him my card and asked him to email me. Frankly I want to try his program out for myself. I also want to know more about how he did it as well.

There were a couple of messages I took from this experience. One key message was that young students are very capable of thinking outside the box. They are quite adept at looking at a tool (in this case C# and the .NET Framework) and putting the pieces together in new and interesting ways. Another is that Visual Studio and the objects in the .NET Framework clearly make a lot of things easier to include in a program than ever before. This student was taking full advantage of them and had created a very powerful application.  The combination of opportunity, the right tools and a young, energetic creative mind is a very wonderful and powerful thing.

I just wish we could introduce programming to more young students. This student is 12 but has already been programming for three years. Bill Gates started programming when he was 13 so this young student has a four year head start. Just imagine the possibilities.

{Note: I have a brief follow up on this student posted as he enters high school.]

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