Remember my oldest kid's fractal paper cut? The youngest one, aged 9, discovered Sudoku a few weeks ago and decided to build his own grid. Here's what he showed us today when coming back from school:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| 3 | 1 | 2 | 9 | 7 | 8 | 6 | 4 | 5 |
| 6 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 9 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 7 | 8 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2 | 3 | 1 | 8 | 9 | 7 | 5 | 6 | 4 |
| 5 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 8 | 9 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 7 | 5 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 1 |
This grid is built with combined vertical and horizontal circular permutations of the top-left 3x3 square. Clever, isn't it? And he wrote it straight ahead, without any preliminary experiment.
Next time, I'll expand on the video games the oldest one, aged 14, is writing in Python with Pygame and the web-based MMORPG he's starting with PHP/MySQL and Ajax... Oh my!!
PS: yes, I'm proud, and no, I haven't pushed them towards geekery. Now the environment plays an important role in children's interests...