For my closing comments on this year& #39;s #SideProjectSummer, I thought I& #39;d show you what I& #39;ve spent the last two weekends doing, on this, a thread entitled "the joy of using coding skills to solve life& #39;s challenges": https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🧵" title="Thread" aria-label="Emoji: Thread">https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="⬇️" title="Pfeil nach unten" aria-label="Emoji: Pfeil nach unten">

Background: we are officially home educating the youngest, having seen how much happier he has been during lockdown -- as well as seeing a lot of educational progress. His last school was great, but we& #39;re grasping this chance to do something that fits him, personally, better.

But I work full time! How are we going to manage!? Answer: PLANNING.

We& #39;ve settled into a pattern where we do his school-ish work 9am-noon, then I crack on with my job, and he cracks on with self-directed learning, until about five. That means those three hours have to be GOOD.

We& #39;re discovering what works for him:
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="✅" title="Fettes weißes Häkchen" aria-label="Emoji: Fettes weißes Häkchen">Gamification (that cheerful owl in @duolingo...)
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="✅" title="Fettes weißes Häkchen" aria-label="Emoji: Fettes weißes Häkchen">Time to actually understand the topic
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="✅" title="Fettes weißes Häkchen" aria-label="Emoji: Fettes weißes Häkchen">Proof of progress
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="✅" title="Fettes weißes Häkchen" aria-label="Emoji: Fettes weißes Häkchen">Feeling knowledgeable
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="✅" title="Fettes weißes Häkchen" aria-label="Emoji: Fettes weißes Häkchen">Video tutorials, to rewind and re-listen
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="✅" title="Fettes weißes Häkchen" aria-label="Emoji: Fettes weißes Häkchen">Text books!
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="✅" title="Fettes weißes Häkchen" aria-label="Emoji: Fettes weißes Häkchen">Choosing the topic
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="✅" title="Fettes weißes Häkchen" aria-label="Emoji: Fettes weißes Häkchen">Feeling like it& #39;s real

And what doesn& #39;t:
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="❌" title="Kreuzzeichen" aria-label="Emoji: Kreuzzeichen">Worksheets (go figure)
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="❌" title="Kreuzzeichen" aria-label="Emoji: Kreuzzeichen">Clip-art-bedecked PowerPoint (good lad)
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="❌" title="Kreuzzeichen" aria-label="Emoji: Kreuzzeichen">Online lessons with a real person
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="❌" title="Kreuzzeichen" aria-label="Emoji: Kreuzzeichen">Feeling like he should already know something
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="❌" title="Kreuzzeichen" aria-label="Emoji: Kreuzzeichen">Fear of getting the wrong answer
Lots has come out on areas he& #39;s shaky on - because he didn& #39;t want to ask.

So: to the planning! How to give a boy back a love of learning, the security of a schedule, an indication of clear progress, and a sense of purpose? I started with a spreadsheet, but that was leggy and boring. Then I wrote a kind of blog: a website with one page per task. Meh.

Then last weekend I thought & #39;sod it& #39;, and sparked up a new Rails 6 app on a $7 server. In a few hours, I& #39;d got a website that had a list of tasks, the date we planned to do it, and a rudimentary tagging system so I could see what we& #39;d done in various topics and subjects.

After only two days& #39; more work, this is what we now have: http://Trakt.co.uk"> http://Trakt.co.uk  (it& #39;s only for us, so you& #39;ll have to just see screenshots, rather than the actual website).

The nature of home education is that you can go off on a tangent very easily (a good thing!), so the focus here is on historical record-keeping rather than regimented forward planning. There& #39;s a huge and growing list of "things to be covered sometime in the next five years"...

...And then each task gets tagged with them.

Not only that -- to make the most of the time and be as efficient as we can, we& #39;re using the scientifically-approved "spaced repetition", to make sure things stick. Part of each task is to add flashcards, to go through daily.

These flashcards get tagged, too, and there& #39;s some logic to control how often each are shown:

The aim with this web app has been to get something up, quickly, to keep the focus on the actual learning (and my work!) So I& #39;ve used things such as randomly generated background images from @unsplash& #39;s API, for the novelties, rather than anything more hand-crafted...

And I& #39;ve been as vanilla as possible, such as ActionText (which does, indeed, Just Workhttps://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="™️" title="Registered-Trade-Mark-Symbol" aria-label="Emoji: Registered-Trade-Mark-Symbol">, so long as you don& #39;t do anything fancy), and HTML5 utilities like the "details" tag, seen here revealing a form. Maybe I& #39;ll loop back and JavaScript it up... but not yet.

It& #39;s fun to solve for what we learned during "school" lockdown:
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🤖" title="Robotergesicht" aria-label="Emoji: Robotergesicht">Microsoft Teams is generic and cumbersome to use in education. If you& #39;re going to use software, make it a hyperspecific solution to the problem,
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🤖" title="Robotergesicht" aria-label="Emoji: Robotergesicht">So much time lost to formatting Google docs!

This is better:

And it& #39;s fun to get the filtering, sorting, mobile layout, and bells and whistles, like "completed!" icons *just right for us*. That& #39;s the beauty of being able to code: it gives you control, so you don& #39;t have to get frustrated trying to tweak Notion / Basecamp / Asana / whatever

There are other threads to write about what I& #39;ve learned about the English National Curriculum, and about the incredible resources available nowadays. Anyway, I thought you might like to see an example of how handy coding skills can be, aside from, yanno, getting jobs an& #39; that.