Stress Buster
Amidst our busy schedules, the biggest stress buster for me and my 12 year old daughter is music. When she sits with her keyboard giving me chords, as I sing my favourite songs, we both enter into the world of music. We spend hours together in this world forgetting our exam and deliverable stress respectively :)
Musical Conversations
In this world, we submerge into the legendary compositions of great musicians. While we enjoy the combination of musical notes in a composition, we would also debate over a few notes.
Though music is a universal language, and a series of notes can bring about the same emotions across countries and cultures, we do have different forms (language) to express the notes in music. While I am comfortable with the carnatic notations (Indian classical music), my daughter is familiar with the western notes. We found it very difficult to communicate with each other and were in desperate need of a translator. I was looking for a tool online, but could never find one.
Necessity is the mother of invention
That is when my daughter decided to create an app using Scratch (a coding language for kids) that will solve our language barrier. While she started the app with the basic functionality, she was too involved and kept improvising the app to look like a piano which would play the notes while it converts the notes as well. It took a few days to complete the app but fixing bugs needed a lot of patience and time.
Bug Fixing
There were days she would come to me frustrated about a bug. When I ask her to explain the problem, most of the time she would arrive at the solution even before I could fully grasp the context :). Perhaps, a clear problem statement would lead to a quick solution. When she completed the app, I could see that her eyes were glowing with a sense of achievement that cannot be explained in words, mainly because she had a solution to our day to day problem.
Kid can inspire mom
Though I am a software engineer with 15 years of experience, I had moved to management roles some time ago and missed the excitement of coding. My daughter's app inspired me to get back to it. I created my version using HTML and published it in my website.
The journey took me through a nostalgic memory lane especially during the bug fixing phase. She tested my app and I tested her app. Since both of us are passionate about music and coding, we found UI bugs as well as the ones related to music. However, I should confess that her version was more detailed with better features :)
No thanks!
In the end, when I asked her, "You seem to be good at coding. Are you going to become a software engineer like mom and dad?". She simply said, "No thanks!". Perhaps I am a boomer who fails to understand that coding is a life skill and you need not become a software engineer if you are good at it :)
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