How to teach your girlfriend Hexadecimal?

It is an age old question: How do you teach your girlfriend hex?

I encountered this problem when I was a web developer in college for a late night student activities program aptly named  Late Nite Binghamton.  My co-worker and girlfriend Mallory was a graduate assistant for the program and had many ideas for how to make the website better and more engaging.  While working with her she would often see me typing in the hexadecimal color codes in css such as:

color: #F24A7D

As I am inept with what color look good (I often say that I never learnt colors) I would often ask her for help with picking out colors and I decided that if she was able to give me these colors in their hex color codes it would make us more efficient :) I sat her down and described to her how they work but after talking for a bit I realized that although she understood everything that I said she wouldn’t gain a feel for what hex numbers related to what colors just from hearing me talk.

In order to help her gain this feel I created a simple game called The Mallory Color Guessing Game.  The game is a webpage which shows you a large colored box and it is your job to guess what the hex color code is. 

 

After you guess it tells you how close you were to the actual color:

 

This game was a hit! Mallory loved it and she would compete with me to see who could guess the color the best.  Pretty quickly she gained a feel for what the hex digits meant and what color they represented. And that is how I taught my girlfriend hex!

 

NOTE: Mallory consistently gets over 80% at the Mallory Color Guessing Game.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 06, 2009
  Great idea.  I know a lot of people who just don't get it, and this looks like an excellent way to learn.