Finishing Up Coding for Kids in Scratch
We are finally here. The final project of the book and for the first time in the last 7 years, we have finished something that we started. I want to say that again. For the first time in 7 years, we have finished an objective that we started. I don’t get to say that a lot. Often times, I’ll give up after just a couple days. I have started creating things numerous times and this is the first time were we sat down, set up some goals, and pressed on. We started by posting our first video on January 7th. Here we are just 20 days later, going to post our final video in this series.
Okay, with that celebration out of the way, I want to take the time to reflect on this accomplishment. First, I know it’s not a major accomplishment. We bought a book, read through the entire book, and simply created video tutorials from the steps outlined in the book. Nothing life changing, nothing “engineering” about it. It was a simple take something that’s already done and just run with it. No reinventing of the wheel. But let me talk about a couple of key points here that I think are important to highlight.
First, in order to get started, we wanted something simple to follow. We wanted to get rid of as many excuses for not getting started as possible. We didn’t want to hit creative and/or technical excuses for not posting content up. Following the book, by the letter, eliminated those excuses and allowed us to just wake up in the morning and create something. I know this may sound insignificant, but here we are 20 days later and we published 10 videos and 1 more on the way later today. That’s a total of 11 videos MORE than if we had done nothing. Again, this doesn’t seem like a lot, but consider this: 1100% improvement over our previous track record of 0. Now that’s a pretty big deal!!
Second, overall this whole journey has been an engineering exercise. When I determined that we were going to commit to creating your Youtube Channel, everything seemed like a daunting task. What would we talk about? How could we create content that people were interested in? Where should we start? What should we create? What topics should we focus on? As you can see, I can go on forever asking these questions. Using the book eliminated using unanswered questions as a scapegoat to NOT get started. We just ran with the book as a foundation for what we hope will become one of the largest tech tutorial channels on the internet. I want to touch on a key point here. Following the book wasn’t cheating. In life, and especially in the professional arena, taking what already exists is a million times better than starting from scratch. . . . sometimes. Look at companies that are successful today. I’ll take a look at Tesla. Sure, the Model 3 was a clean sheet design that cost billions of dollars to create. But the real secret is that the Model Y will use 95% of the design from the Model 3 to be even more successful. Rather than creating an entirely new vehicle, Tesla is going to take something they know already works, make some improvements, and ship billions of new inventory around the world! This isn’t “cheating” This is engineering at its finest.
Some closing notes. We are sitting down, watching all of our videos and taking notes on what went well and what didn’t. We are identifying areas of improvement and things that need to go away. This is all part of the engineering process. As we get ready to transition into our next phase, I’d appreciate any feedback you may have. We are doing lots of homework and plan to deliver almost daily content (daily isn’t sustainable for our sanity) in the month of February. I’ve been checking out this resource here as a pivot point to determine what we need to add and what we need to improve in order to have the best channel for the community of learners out there in the internet.
Thank you all for reading along. These next posts going forward I think will be a little more intimate as I’ll be doing a lot more analysis of what we want our brand to be and documenting it here. We are just getting started and I can’t wait to share all the details with this community here!
