Rockin’ Code With Rosalee!

Meet 12-year-old Rosalee from Oklahoma! She will be in the 7th grade in August and has a love of art, sculpting, and drawing. Rosalee really enjoys drawing dragons – especially animating their eyes! She is excited to spend her summer creating art and coding. We sat down with Rosalee and her mom, Laura, to find out more about our Featured Maker!

How did you get introduced to coding? On our school’s iPads they have this workshop called Tynker for the games, and when we finish our work we get to play the app! I like Tynker because you get to play games, like the projects where you press the button and you change the looks. I also like animations and the stories!

What are your favorite Tynker courses or tutorials? I like the dragon one the most! I used that to learn because I meddled with it, played with it, and then started to see where that game was originally from. That’s where I learned how to do the walking stuff, but I just stick to animation.

How did you feel when you found out your project had been featured? I was excited! That was my goal and I always wondered, “What do I want to do that I like?” Afterwards, I saw the user Purpleberry do a pet dragon thing, so then I thought, “I like to do dragons and I can draw dragons really well,” so I decided to make a dragon-maker.

How do you get inspiration for your projects? I get my ideas online and I look up my quotes on the internet, too. I’m not really good at drawing on the iPad, but I know how to draw dragons really well because I practiced a lot on them. I prefer drawing on paper!

“Dragon maker” Check out more of Rosalee’s projects here!

Why do you like to code? Coding is really nice for me and it helps me get away from everything!

Do you have a favorite code block? There’s this code block that I know really well – it’s just repeating the phases over and over again. I like how they tell the stories, because they just make pictures, a little bit of coding, and then it’s done! That’s what I do for the animations.

What do you do with a project when you’re done with it? I look at it a couple of times and see if I made a mistake or anything that I need to improve! After, I either show my friend Alex or some other friends, and then I’ll publish it.

What advice would you give to kids starting out with Tynker? Do your best and never give up!

Rosalee’s mom, Laura, understands that the future is in computers and is ecstatic that her daughter is getting a head start! “Computers are becoming more and more a part of our lives,” she said. “Twenty years ago I didn’t have a computer attached to my hip, and now I do!”

Laura learned a little about programming and computers when she was in school, like the programming language Pascal. She knows that learning technological skills at a young age builds important skills and creates new opportunities.

“It teaches them how to think logically,” she said, “they have to go through it step-by-step, and if they skip a step, the computer program is not going to work the way they intended.”

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us, Rosalee and Laura! We cannot wait to see what other creative projects you will share with the Tynker community!