I never thought I would be posting Bill and Zuck bragging about their early coding experiences, but here I deny it and do it. Why? Because I too started to code as a kid in 1980, in school, in Naw Haven, Connecticut. I wrote a program in BASIC, called “2 minute football”, with my older brother Greg. A player had only two minutes to come back from 9 points down and win. No graphics at all. Just a number matrix and a flashing ball.

Then as a freshmen in college I coded in Assembler language and Pascal. I made a Cat & Mouse graphical video game that challenged me more than 4 years of latin in greek in high school. Solving problems for credit, what a blast. I went to work for IBM and for 3 years sold software solutions. With the money I shot my first films. What I knew as “Problem Solving”, I began to call… “Conflict”.

I love Coding because it’s problem solving in a controlled environment. It’s logical (plan, design) , abstract (math) and narrative (code begins and ends, like a story). But Code serves another primary purpose, learning form your own mistakes, debugging your own thinking process. Coding allows to do stuff we just could not do before. Coding empowered me with new knowledge and experience. And now that film is digital, Code and Story go even more together.

Thanks to Code.org for activating the EDU button in the global algorithm, and for joining two key pieces of the puzzle: kids and problem solving.

Let’ fit more puzzle pieces together.

.Danny
CINEMAHEAD

http://www.code.org