This week I stood at a primary school careers fair, on what turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year so far, and tried to convince children between the ages of four and eleven that software development is the best job in the world. I had a stand, a looping deck of slides, a board of brand logos, and a game I had built for them to play. By the end of the day my shirt was stuck to my back, the hall felt like the inside of a kettle, and I had enjoyed myself more than I have at almost any conference I have ever paid to attend. The game The thing I most wanted on the stand was not a poster. It was something a child could pick up, do, and walk away from grinning. So I built Mars Rover Coder, and it lives at barnack.lord.technology — go and have a go, it works on a phone. The premise is the whole lesson, smuggled inside a game. There is a rover on Mars. You cannot drive it with a joystick, because Mars is a very long way away and the signal would take minutes to arrive, so…
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