Meet Paige: Artist, Animal Lover, and Coder

Paige is an 11-year-old from Bow, Washington who has published some truly delightful projects to the Tynker community, many of which involve taking care of animals and beautiful hand-drawn artwork. We asked her some questions about why she codes and what inspires her to create the projects she publishes.

What are your hobbies? Well, I like to draw, I like to read, I like to play with my sister. I also love badminton–that’s really fun.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I would like to be a vet. I love animals and I really want to take care of them. We have five pets, not including the fish: three cats and two dogs.

How did you get introduced to coding? We were in Walla Walla and I was talking to my dad, who’s a software developer, and I was like, “I want to start coding,” and he was like, “Yeah, let’s start you off with Blitz Basic.” And I looked it up and I started doing it, but it was too advanced for me, so I started looking for coding apps and my mom helped me get one called Tynker. It was really fun. It was way easier. I liked the dragging and dropping instead of just typing it out. I find it much easier. I love the art.

Do you ever look at the projects in the Tynker community? Oh yeah, I like to play them and look at their coding to help me with some of my problems that I’m having with my bugs in my games. So I look at theirs to see if there’s anything I can do to help my code get better.

What’s your favorite thing you’ve made? Probably the fruit slice game. Well, the first successful game I made was the ogre one. And the fruit one was the strawberry, then the lemon. That was another one of my games that I really worked on. And I gave credit to my sister Hannah. She thought of the fruit slice game. She and my mom helped me with the idea of it.

Do you think other kids should try coding? Oh yeah, I’ve already shown one of my friends Caden. I helped him make a game where you touch the screen and the actor jumps and there’s a log that you have to avoid.

Why do you like coding? I like to code because it just gets my mind out there. It relaxes me. It’s really fun. And, like, I don’t have a lot of other games on my tablet. I don’t play a lot of other games. I focus mainly on Tynker and it’s just so much fun.

What advice would you give to kids who are new to coding? I would show them the tutorials, like the basic projects and everything and show them how the coding works. Like, that’s how I started out. I didn’t even know how to do it and I just started looking at it and thinking, “Oh, I kinda know how this works.” And then I started creating blank projects and I didn’t even need to use a template.

Thanks so much for talking to us, Paige! We’re so blown away by your beautiful artwork and creative coding. Check out more of Paige’s fun games and projects here: