Multi-Talented Nathan Loves Coding!

When Nathan isn’t acting in commercials, doing Taekwondo as a first degree black belt, or attending rehearsal for theater, he’s coding amazing games! Ten-year-old Nathan is from Sulphur Springs, Texas, and his projects really impressed us. Luckily, Nathan had a bit of time in between his cool activities to chat about why he likes to code and how he uses Tynker!

What do you want to be when you grow up? I’d like to be an inventor – that’s why I started coding.

Why do you like to code? I like to code because it gives me a fun way to make games, not just go onto an app.

How did you feel when you found out your project had been featured? I was like, “Oh my gosh! I’m featured!”

Fidget Spinner 2.0

How do creativity and coding fit together for you? I love building things – I have more than 10,000 Legos. For example, I didn’t have a fidget spinner so I made my own! I saw the ones people made on Tynker – that’s why I made my game.

How do you get inspiration for your projects? I’ve seen a whole bunch of fidget spinner games, and they spin when you tap it, until forever. They never stop spinning, so I was inspired to create a game so you could stop it when you didn’t want it to spin. I also added different varieties of fidget spinners.

What is your favorite project you’ve made so far? During Code-A-Thon, Week 4, I created a game to help the community, where you had to go and pick up the trash and put it in the trash can, put the recycle into the recycle bucket, you had to clean up the river, you have to help a tree live by swiping around a car’s gas. I did all the Code-A-Thon projects. Every day I’d be like, okay, week 4’s over, then I’d be like finally, week 5 is here!

What do you do with a project when you’re done with it? I make sure everything’s exactly as I’d like it to be, sometimes I rename it, and I hit publish! I click play and make sure that everything’s working right and that no actor is acting funny because that’s happened before!

Your Day Job pt. 1

How did you get introduced to Tynker? At school, our teacher gave us free time, so I found this app and thought, “Oh, this is for coding? I have a coding game, but maybe this one’s better.”

How did you learn how to use Tynker? I kind of figured out on my own what the new bricks were supposed to do!

Have you played through any Tynker courses? I’ve done the dragon one and the space one. I liked the dragon one better because it was more complicated.

How do you think learning coding now will help you in the future? I think it’ll help me when I’m trying to make robots. I could use this because Tynker is now pairing with devices.

What advice would you give to kids starting out with Tynker? I’d say, make sure you know what the blocks do before you use them!

What’s a fun fact about you? I do commercial acting! One time we were told that I needed to be a background extra for a pizza commercial! They gave us pizza and a drink, naturally, and they didn’t ask us which pizza was our favorite because I got a Veggie Lover’s Supreme! Good thing I was blurry because I was just in the background picking off all the veggies, hiding them under my plate!

Nathan’s mom Melissa is “really excited that Nathan gets to code!” She told us that “he’s expressed an interest in engineering and in robotics.” She thinks “it’s really going to help him because everything is going toward computers, so he’ll need to know how to use them.”

While she doesn’t have any coding experience herself, she supports her son’s endeavors! In her words, “Nathan really wants to be an engineer, and specifically, he’s talked about being a structural engineer, so he wants to work on architecture and designing building plans.”

Melissa said that while Nathan has tried other coding programs, they “didn’t allow for a lot of creativity and personalization,” and that “Tynker allows him to be creative.”

Thanks for speaking with us, Nathan and Melissa! We can’t wait to see where your creativity takes you, Nathan. Keep coding!