VOA常速英语:孩子们学习编程并编写小游戏

My name is Ethan.
I’m 10 years old.
I worked on some robots and a game.
It’s kind of difficult.
I hope I can make five or to seven games by the end of this week.
Code Ninjas is a center where children, ages 7 through 14 learn, how to code.
We want to leverage screen time and make it productive.
Kids love video games.
That’s why we have built our curriculum around learning how to code.
By building video games, the kids are engaged.
When they’re engaged and having fun, they’re going to learn.
We also had a drone station where the drones were being coded,
so that they would code the flight path,test it out through the hoops and then adjust as necessary.
Our Code Sensei’s have a variety of background.
The first thing that we look for is that they’re good with children.
It looks awesome.
My name is Andrea Hatcher.
I am a Code Sensei here.
It’s a real traffic light.
I am a junior at Penn State, studying cybersecurity.
There you go.
Girls are something in STEM that I’m very,very passionate about, always have been, very passionate about, always have been.
And the girls, you know, they stay with the boys.
They love it.
The cyber and technology field is the fastest growing industry in the world.
The United States is far behind it.
The earlier you learn,the more time you have to develop and hone-in those skills.
And that this age is when they’re really soaking up information like a sponge.
Parents are happy because the kids are happy
and at the end,they’re able to show Mom and Dad what they built.
I have an eight-year-old daughter Marion,who has been coming to Code Ninjas for a bit now.
Last week, she created a video game where her creative dinosaur would follow the mouse around and catch the mouse.
So each week she is creating video games on a very small scale that will eventually build to more advanced.
Coding would be a very useful skill for her to see the back end of the video games that she loves playing,
and help her kind of formulate the necessary skill set to see if that is something that she wants to do.
She’s only eight.
So, it’s really fun right now