Bella Looks to Her Favorite Tynkerers for Advice!

Bella just started coding this year and already has a featured project! We’re impressed by the way she combines her budding programming skills with her artistic ability to create amazing projects in Tynker. For Bella, coding is “really, really fun.” She continued, “I think it lets me be creative.”

Bella lives and codes in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. When the ten-year-old Featured Maker isn’t hard at work in her 4th grade classroom or coding on Tynker, she’s drawing or reading. She’s even planning to create a speed painting YouTube channel! She loves art class at school and plans on being a digital artist or a graphic novelist when she grows up. Read on to discover more about Bella’s creative process and why she loves to code!

How did you feel when you found out your project had been featured? I was so happy I almost wanted to start dancing, but I was in class so I couldn’t.

How did you get introduced to Tynker? My teacher said that we could download it on our school iPad just to see what it was like and play around with it, and I started to really like it.

How did you learn how to use Tynker when you were first starting out? I used a lot of the courses because I had no idea how to do anything, but the courses really helped me.

How do you get inspiration for your projects? I look a lot in the community, and I look to my favorite Tynkerers for some advice. Sometimes I look at the code to see how they did it.

How do you use your creativity when you code? I use it by drawing because I like to draw a lot of art for my projects. 

What is your favorite project you’ve made so far? My favorite project is probably my Pikachu animation.

“Pikachu Animation” Check out more of Bella’s projects here! 

Is there anything you’re planning to make next or currently working on? I’m actually working on a couple of animations right now. One that I’m working on where it’s a fox that walks in a forest, then it gets scared because there is a wolf. The other one is a person waving hello.

What do you do with a project when you’re done with it? I like to show it to a couple of my friends and see what their opinion is of it. If I like it I’ll show them, and if they like it I look through the code and make sure there are no glitches or anything, then I publish it.

What’s your favorite feature in Tynker? Probably the art, the drawing thing. There are a lot of awesome tools on there, and a lot of good colors too.

“Make a Beautiful Donut”

How do you think learning to code now may help you in the future? I think that digital art contains a lot of coding, and if I want to be able to do that I might need to use the code. If I ever take a programming class in the future, I will definitely need to know how to code then too.

Do you think other kids should try coding? Definitely! If they were ever to take up a career in computers, or art, they will need some code, if they want to program games or things like that.

What advice would you give to kids starting out with Tynker? That they should just be creative! And the tutorials really help. Just play around with it and see what happens.

Bella’s mom, Jenniah, loves that Bella is learning to code! In her words, “having her interested in something in the STEM field is fantastic for me. The whole world is going to be digital in like 10 years, and she’s getting a good start now and is really into it, I love it.”

In Jenniah’s opinion, learning to code is important because it “teaches problem-solving! They have to figure out what works and what doesn’t. They have to debug their stuff which is great. It teaches them to think outside the box, and it gives them the freedom to come up with great ideas and the technical knowledge to put them into practice.”

She spoke about Bella’s combination of art and coding, saying, “She’s really interested in art and she’s putting it into a whole new category. It’s really expanding on what she can do and I think it’s great. She enjoys playing on your site so much and using the app so much that it’s really cool to see her experiment and see what she can do.”

For Jenniah, computer science is “just such a great thing to have a good, solid foundation in, and it’s just really fun for her.” She told us, “I love that she’s getting interested in it early. It’s a fun way to learn it too, it’s not just learning C++ in a classroom. She’s actually getting to have a real-world application of what she’s using, and learning it while playing, which is fantastic.”

As in many families, Tynker time isn’t the same as regular screen time for Jenniah. “We don’t count coding as screen time because it’s so educational. She will not watch TV, she will not play on the computer – she’ll choose to use Tynker instead.”

Bella is lucky to have parents who are very supportive of her coding endeavors! “We give her a little bit of freedom to explore the coding world and see what she can learn,” Jenniah said. “We have a friend who works in coding, so we’re going to see if she can shadow him this summer for a day. She likes to go on YouTube and watch videos of other coders!”

Thanks for chatting with us, Bella and Jenniah! We can’t wait to see what you come up with next, Bella – keep coding!