Code Monster teaches kids to crunch Javascript, builds appetite for programming. Greg Linden with his Code Monster programming site. Greg Linden is a veteran software engineer and startup entrepreneur in Seattle who developed Amazon.com’s recommendation engine, started the personalized news website Findory.com and worked for Microsoft’s Live Labs, among other tech ventures and companies. He’s also a parent who wants to make sure his kids learn a little about computer programming languages. But when he initially looked around for something helpful online, all he could find “was either tutorials designed for adults that overwhelm younger learners with their boring syntax and complexity, or games that didn’t teach an actual, valuable programming language.”
So he came up with a solution: Code Monster from Crunchzilla. The site uses live code in the browser, letting users program in one pane and see the results in another, as the Code Monster leads them from lesson to lesson. Code Monster will be part of a suite of products from Linden’s Geeky Ventures Inc. Microsoft Sends Engineers to Schools to Encourage the Next Generation. Stuart Isett for The New York Times “We are taking the kids farther than I could do,” said Michael Braun, a teacher who is working with the Microsoft volunteers.
“My teacher said there’s a lot of money to be made in computer science,” Leandre said. “It could be really helpful in the future.” That teacher, Steven Edouard, knows a few things about the subject. In doing so, Microsoft is taking an unusual approach to tackling a shortage of computer science graduates — one of the most serious issues facing the technology industry, and a broader challenge for the nation’s economy. There are likely to be 150,000 computing jobs opening up each year through 2020, according to an analysis of federal forecasts by the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional society for computing researchers. “People can’t get jobs, and we have jobs that can’t be filled,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel who oversees its philanthropic efforts, said in a recent interview.
Robots, Codebreaking and S'mores: Welcome To Summer Camp For Supergeeks. Why Estonia Has Started Teaching Its First-Graders To Code. Why Absolutely Everyone Needs To Be Software Literate. Mentorship From Silicon Valley Techies Encourages High School Girls To Dream Bigger. University of Florida Eliminates Computer Science Department, Increases Athletic Budgets. Hmm. Why all our kids should be taught how to code | Education | The Observer. What's missing from teaching computing in schools is a big vision. Photograph: Alamy A vigorous debate has begun – within government and elsewhere – about what should be done about information and communication technology (ICT) in the school curriculum. Various bodies – the Royal Society, the Association for Learning Technology, Computing at School (a grassroots organisation of concerned teachers) and the British Computer Society, to name just four – have published reports and discussion documents aimed at ministers and the Department for Education.
Michael Gove, the education secretary, made an enigmatic speech at the recent BETT technology conference indicating that a rethink is under way in the bowels of Whitehall. So something's happening: there's a sense of tectonic plates shifting. But as with most big policy debates, there's a lot of axe-grinding, lobbying and special pleading going on. Universities want to reverse the decline in applicants for computer science courses. How Codecademy got so hot, so fast. Codecademy is on fire right now. The startup, which teaches users how to program with an interactive and social web application, has garnered more than 1 million users (including bold-faced names such as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg) and made learning how to write computer code trendy with its “Code Year” program aimed at the New Year’s resolution crowd. And all this from a startup that’s only five months old, with just five full-time staffers. I sat down with Codecademy co-founder and CEO Zach Sims to hear about how the company got to this point so quickly, and what’s on deck for the months ahead.
Here are a few key takeaways: Necessity breeds invention The idea behind Codecademy emerged out of the founding duo’s frustrations with the status quo of learning how to program. “I was watching videos and tutorials and reading books,” Sims said. Timing is everything Screenshot of an introductory Codecademy lesson (click to enlarge) “Programming is the new literacy,” Sims said.
Turn On, Code In, Drop Out: Tech Programmers Don’t Need College Diplomas - Technology. David King got his start as a professional programmer working odd jobs. He took on small software projects, set up networks, that sort of thing. For fun in his spare time he’d contribute to the open-source operating system FreeBSD—a pastime many developers consider the most thankless job ever. People started to notice. Eventually, King landed a gig with Reddit, the biggest social news site on the web. Now he’s one of six engineers at Hipmunk, a travel site with good buzz and $5 million in funding. He works with his friends, makes a good living, has equity. While there are a few high-level computer-science concepts that require a college education to master, King says, 90 percent of developers won’t use that knowledge in their day jobs. That process is fine for most industries—a Harvard-educated accountant is a lot more likely to be a good hire then a self-taught one. It’s a good time to be a developer.
The demand starts at the top. Developers have an attractive menu of options. Why Aren't Computer Programming Languages Designed Better? | Co.Design. For many digital products, poor user interface design and UX can sink an app’s fortunes even if the underlying engineering is powerful and innovative. (Remember Color?) But what about the interfaces behind the interface, the ones that developers spend hundreds or thousands of hours interacting with while they build software for the rest of us?
Yes, I’m talking about programming languages. Unless you’ve had specialized training, looking at lines of code is like reading hieroglyphs, only less intuitive. According to findings by researchers from Southern Illinois University, this reaction isn’t just because you’re a n00b: they found that Perl, a major programming language used by untold zillions of developers, is no more intuitive to novices than a language with a randomly generated syntax.
Let that sink in. They created a "placebo language" called Randomo, whose syntax was randomly generated, to use in trials alongside Quorum and Perl. Integer i = 0 repeat 10 times i = i + 1 end. Kidsruby.com. KidsRuby Teaches Your Children How to Program. You’ve got to start them young, right? With kids picking up on how to use a computer faster than ever before, why not teach them how to program too? Kids Ruby is a piece of software and set of tutorials that teaches kids the art of development, with Ruby as its programming language of choice. Forget science fairs, your son or daughter could be the next Mark Zuckerberg. The software is available for Mac or PC, or if you’re feeling really adventurous, you can install the KidsRuby OS, which is built on Ubuntu. Now that’s a cool weekend project, especially if you’ve purchased a new household computer for Christmas.
Teach your kids how to program The KidsRuby site speaks about programming in a way that kids can understand. When we say “hack your homework” we mean “learn how to write a computer program to help you with your homework”. How adorable is that? With the KidsRuby editor and curriculum, children can jump right in and start creating simple programs in Ruby: ➤ KidsRuby. Meet the Internet’s newest boy genius. Meetings, travel, Le Web and pitches from countless startups have left me exhausted. I have hardly slept for nearly a week. I am tired and a little irritated and in need of a pick-me-up. An espresso shot isn’t enough. What I need is a conversation that would sharpen my senses dulled by repetitiveness of ideas and marginality of ambition. And in the nick of time (pun intended), enter Nick D’Aloisio — founder and for now chief executive officer of a London-based company, Summly.
(Download the app) On paper, it is yet another start-up with yet another iPhoneapp. Summly essentially looks at the content of a web page and creates a quick summary of that web page, then formats it nicely for the iPhone screen. It is solving the problem that many others are trying to solve — how to make sense of the web overrun by factory-produced, SEO-optimized diahrrea of words. Nick O’ Time Let me share his story. Why? Sentiment is everything The success of Trimit didn’t go unnoticed. Best is yet to come. Developer's Night | a tidal force. Apple's plan to get its products in schools? Educate the educators. Apple products have penetrated multiple markets, shaking up the way people work, create, design and learn by using the company’s range of desktop computers, notebooks and handheld devices. The company’s new CEO, Tim Cook, recently told media at its iPhone 4S launch event that the iPad was now being deployed or tested by 92 percent of the Fortune 500 within their enterprises, rising from 75 percent last quarter.
Just under half of the Global 500 have adopted the tablet – using it in medical establishments, in construction and a whole range of different environments. One area that we know has grown substantially over the years is how schools, colleges and universities are rapidly adopting Apple products, shifting from paper textbooks to ebooks and digital publications. Apple products are often much more expensive than other devices on the market, so how does Apple tempt schools to deploy its Mac computers and supply their students with iPads?
Absolutely amazing: 6th grade iPhone app developer speaks at TEDx. 9 November '11, 07:17pm Follow Thomas Suarez is in the 6th grade at a middle school in the South Bay. And while most of his peers are probably fussing over new soccer kleets or watching the Disney channel, he’s creating iOS apps and giving TED Talks. Suarez, who’s not even old enough to have a Facebook account, has been fascinated by computers and technology since before kindergarten. He’s established his own company, CarrotCorp and has made two iOS apps that are currently in the App Store: Earth Fortune, which displays different colors of Earth depending on what your fortune is and his most successful- Bustin Jieber, a Whac-a-Mole for Justin Bieber. “A lot of kids these days like to play games, but now they want to make them,” he says. Knowing that human beings such as Suarez exist makes me really hopeful and excited for the future.
Empirical Software Engineering. As researchers investigate how software gets made, a new empire for empirical research opens up Greg Wilson, Jorge Aranda Software engineering has long considered itself one of the hard sciences. After all, what could be “harder” than ones and zeroes? In reality, though, the rigorous examination of cause and effect that characterizes science has been much less common in this field than in supposedly soft disciplines like marketing, which long ago traded in the gut-based gambles of “Mad Men” for quantitative, analytic approaches.
A growing number of researchers believe software engineering is now at a turning point comparable to the dawn of evidence-based medicine, when the health-care community began examining its practices and sorting out which interventions actually worked and which were just-so stories. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Broadly speaking, people who study programming empirically come at the problem from one of two angles. These results can even influence hardware design.