How Quickly They Learn

Terrie brought her teenage daughter to work today.
I have an extra desk in my office, so she hung out with me most of the day. She, like many other teenagers, have a MySpace blog site. She showed me hers, and last weekend the other girls introduced me to theirs. Boy, they look pretty elaborate, very simple to setup and use, very graphically oriented. I would almost say the pages are a little too cluttered for my taste, but I was impressed with the teenage ingenuity.

She saw something she liked on someone else's blog and said aloud: "I wonder how she got that?"
"Asked the right question, you did, my little padouin."
"At the top of the browser, go to view, then view source." I said. Sometime shortly afterward, I told her to copy and paste her code into notepad before testing it.
I have to say this girl took to html like a fish in water. She got into the zone and started pulling snippets of code together and experimenting around. I gave her the briefest of instructions when she asked. Formatting text and closing brackets and such. By the end of the day, she was typing lines of code straight from memory. I'm still a cut-and-paste editor.
I know the relative intelligence of 16 year old girls, but I think I recognized a prodigy. She never knew that you can view the source of a webpage, once I showed it to her and told her the difference between html and xml, she read the code and started tearing it up.
Some people have the potential, some don't. This girl definitely has the gift.
She also has a new hobby that will keep her up at night for the next few weeks.
I told Terrie that I was a bit surprised at how fast her daughter picked it up.
That was fun.

MsAmber