Computational Thinking

"Yeah," I agreed. "It was quite the adventure."

"I mean, I was such a fan of 99dresses. I'm so stoked to meet you in person!"

I was in a pub in Brisbane, Australia, talking to a bubbly blonde with an English accent. She looked familiar, but I couldn't quite put my finger on where I'd seen her before. The year was 2017.

Louise was a digital nomad who'd just arrived in Australia to participate in the Hotdesq program — a grant initiative by the Queensland state government. The program aimed to attract more experienced startup entrepreneurs into the ecosystem, so they could share their knowledge with the locals.

"Oh, this is my fiancé," Louise said. A man with pale skin and a black shirt placed a drink in front of her.

"Hey, I'm Ed," he said. "So, you're in Hotdesq too?"

"Yeah," I smiled. "I'm really excited. I think I'm going to like Brisbane. I've never been here before, actually."

"What are you working on?" Ed asked.

"It's an online coding school for eight to twelve-year-old kids. We run live online coding classes, where a teacher and up to four kids will get together in a video call each week to code a Minecraft mod, and then test it out in Minecraft together."

"Sounds awesome!" Louise said.

"Yeah," Ed agreed. "How'd you come up with that?"

"It's a long story. The basic gist of it is, I was volunteering at my old school, teaching coding to the girls there. I noticed they were all obsessed with Minecraft, so I began investigating the game. It turns out, you can hack the game using code. So my co-founder and I built a little online platform that allowed kids to write drag-and-drop code that modifies their Minecraft game, and then we ran classes using the platform. Kids loved it. Parents loved it. And so here we are. It's pretty fun, actually. We basically get paid to blow shit up in Minecraft with kids. There are worse things I could be spending my time on."

"I love it," Ed said. "Technology is the future."

"Yeah, well, I believe programming is one of the most highly-leveraged skills a child can learn. To be honest, we're not actually teaching them how to code. We're teaching them how to think. The drag-and-drop code abstracts away the particular programming language, so kids can purely focus on learning how to think like a computer and structure their programs in a clear and logical way. Anyway, it's just supposed to be a fun lifestyle business. What about you? What do you guys do?"

They both looked at each other and laughed. "So much!" Ed said. "We're all about passive income, so we have multiple smaller projects: online courses, crypto, Louise's youtube channel-"

"Oh! What's that?" I asked.

"I just make youtube videos, mainly about digital nomad stuff."

Louise shared her channel with me, and I looked it up on my phone. "Oh, wow!" I exclaimed. "It says I watched one of your videos, like, six months ago when I was researching Thailand."

"You were in Thailand?" Louise asked. "Ed and I love Chiang Mai!"

"Yeah, me too! I was there for three months before coming here."

"How'd you end up in Chiang Mai?" Ed asked.

"Well, I'd always wanted to slow-travel and work. I'd recently started CodeMakers, and in the space of a week, both my co-founder left the business, and my boyfriend was offered this amazing opportunity to move to France, so that relationship ended quite suddenly."

"Ouch," Louise winced. "That sucks."

"Yeah, well, that's life. Anyway, I realized that those two guys were the only people keeping me in Sydney, and Sydney is ridiculously expensive, so I just bought a ticket and left. My parents thought I was nuts, but it was honestly the most productive three months of my life! Just me and my laptop and a nice little apartment and my bicycle and a little co-working space and some good coffee."