Abby Uses Coding to Bring Her Art to Life

Abby is a 12-year-old from Clearwater, Florida whose coding projects caught our eye. She creates incredible hand-drawn artwork, and then animates it using coding to build amazing visual experiences. Learn more about Abby and why she loves to code!

What are your hobbies? 3D animation and drawing. Typically, I just draw to express myself. I put my thoughts down on paper.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I want to either work for Pixar or be a 3D modeler and work on special effects for movies.

How did you get introduced to coding? My friends at school found this cool app called Tynker and they were like, “Hey, come check it out!” We have iPads at our school, and they had Tynker on there, and everyone was like, “Wow, what’s Tynker?” And we just tried it out, and we were like, “Wow, this is really cool! We should get into this and make some really cool projects.” So we did, and I’m like, “I think I want to try this and actually make something really cool.” So I looked around in the featured section and saw the face makers, and thought, “I want to make one because I’m good at drawing.”

How do you make your drawings? Just with my fingers. I mean, I like it. I think it’s pretty easy.

Do your friends use Tynker? Oh yeah, yeah yeah yeah. All the kids I hang out with use Tynker and they love it.

Check out a couple of Abby’s awesome coding projects.

Do you like looking at the Tynker community? Yeah, a lot. I always look through other people’s work. I like looking mostly for inspiration and what other people have done. Or like how they have gotten inspired by others, just generally how creative people can be. I tend to look through the code and look around because sometimes I get lost and don’t know what to do but I can look at other people’s codes and see shortcuts or how to drag and drop here!

What’s something you want to make but don’t know how yet? Well there is a lot of things. I’d like to add to my facemaker or be able to make animations. I could figure out how to do the animation and have a whole bunch of costumes and switch the costumes rapidly – I think that’d be really cool and everyone would be wowed by that. Maybe like a school simulator? Like you could go to different classes and have a teacher drone on, and when the bell rings, time to go to the next class!

What do you do with a project when you’re done with it? Publish it. I usually either wait to see if I can add something else to it. Or I say well I like it, I can submit it. I have a talking simulator that I’ve been trying to update the background and make it look not as basic but I think it looks pretty good so far.

Why do you like to code? I think it’s just fun! It’s really interesting because I can figure out order of operations, sequencing which I think is really interesting.

Do you think other kids should try coding? Yes, I think it’d be a really good idea for kids to branch out into technology because more people could get interested in it and there would be more jobs with technology.

What advice would you give for kids starting out with Tynker? Just take little steps and don’t try to make a gigantic project at first because I tried that and it just doesn’t work! Take the beginner and intermediate things at the beginning and then go to the blank template.

Abby’s dad Phil says coding is a perfect fit for his daughter because it allows her to “bring her art to life in new ways.” He sees learning to code as something that has lots of benefits for kids: “logical thinking, problem solving, slipping in math without them realizing it… it’s a transferrable skill to every aspect of their life.” And as Abby reminded him, it’s like “slipping in some veggies” into something that tastes really good so kids are learning and benefiting while they think they’re just having fun.

Thanks Abby and Phil! We feel so inspired by Abby’s artwork and coding projects.

Check out some of Abby’s amazing artwork and projects: