Boy Scout Oliver Codes with Honor

Boy Scout Oliver Codes with Honor

Featured Maker Oliver Cole, from Ohio, is a history buff with an interest in joining the military–he plans to be an engineer in the army! Outside of school, he loves to play football with his friends.

Oliver has only been coding for a year and is a Boy Scout who loves camping and any other outdoor activity! He has many badges, but so far is most proud of his badge that shows his progression from a Cub Scout to a Boy Scout. We sat down with Oliver to talk about his ideas for his coding projects and how he likes to express them!

How did you get introduced to Tynker? Our school found the app and we’re supposed to be using it, and we just used it the rest of the year.

How have your coding skills improved since you started using Tynker? A lot!  I actually saw what other people did and I started making stuff.

How did you feel when you found out your project had been featured? Excitement!

Where did you get the idea for your project and how long did it take you to make? I’m a big fan of Star Wars, so I made that! It took me a month or two.

How do you get inspiration for your projects? I look at other people’s and I try to make it but with different topics and stuff. There are also some regular games on Tynker that I see and I try to recreate those!

Why do you like to code? Because it can be entertaining!

What do you do with a project when you’re done with it? I’ll show it to my friends to see how they like it, and then I’ll publish it.

“Spaceship Takeoff”

What is your favorite project you’ve made so far? The one that got featured! I like how I made this game and that a lot of people have seen it and liked it. I was making a better version of it but I never got to finish before the school year ended.

What’s your favorite thing you can do in Tynker? I like to make Minecraft mods, I find it really cool and funny!

How do you think learning to code has prepared you for the future?  It’s probably why I really want to be an engineer – a computer engineer!

Do you think other kids should try coding? Yeah, because it can inspire you for the future and it can get you prepared for it. Also will help you for your education.

What advice would you give to kids starting out with Tynker? Try getting into the “when I receive this, and when I broadcast.” They should start using those a lot more often than I’ve seen people use it.

Lyndie, Oliver’s mom, told us what she thinks about Oliver learning how to code: “It’s so amazing! I have no idea what any of that is all about. I’m a nurse, so it’s a totally different world to me, but he’s winning awards at school! The principal is calling me, telling me she gets chills when she sees his stuff. It makes me so happy; I’m very proud of him.”

Lyndie observes how Oliver’s confidence is growing and told us how she thinks coding will help him in the future: “I feel like it can be a great career for him. I talked to the high school student who helped him set up the project that he won at school and through all of his experiences, he has had 100% of his college tuition paid for by all the scholarships that he’s won. I hope that can happen for Oliver too, since he’s so good at it. I hope that he can find the scholarships and all those programs to help him get into a decent college and to do the engineering that he wants to do.” Oliver is in a gifted program in his school, where he got introduced to coding and discovered that he loved it!

Thank you so much, Oliver and Lyndie, for taking the time to interview with us! We can’t wait to see what kind of projects Oliver makes next. Happy coding!