Another Word For It

Kids, programming, and doing more by Greg Linden.

From the post:

I built Code Monster and Code Maven to get more kids interested in programming. Why is programming important?

Computers are a powerful tool. They let you do things that would be hard or impossible without them.

Trying to find a name that might be misspelled in a million names would take weeks to do by hand, but takes mere moments with a computer program. Computers can run calculations and transformations of data in seconds that would be impossible to do yourself in any amount of time. People can only keep about seven things in their mind at once; computers excel at looking at millions of pieces of data and discovering correlations in them.

Being able to fully use a computer requires programming. If you can program, you can do things others can’t. You can do things faster, you can do things that otherwise would be impossible. You are more powerful.

A reminder from Greg that our presentation of programming can make it “difficult” or “attractive.”

The latter requires more effort on our part but as he has demonstrated, it is possible.

Children (allegedly) being more flexible than adults, should be good candidates for attractive interfaces that use topic map principles.

So they become conditioned to options such as searching under different names for the same subjects. Or associations using different names appear as one association.

Topic map flexibility becomes their expectation rather than an exception to the rule.

Teaching is about conveying a way of thinking by Jon Udell.

From the post:

As I build out the elmcity network, launching calendar hubs in towns and cities around the country, I’ve been gathering examples of excellent web thinking. In Ann Arbor’s public schools are thinking like the web I noted that the schools in that town — and most particularly the Slauson Middle School — are Doing It Right with respect to online calendars. How, I wondered, does that happen? How does a middle school figure out a solution that eludes most universities, theaters, city governments, nightclubs, museums, and other organizations with calendars of interest to the public?

[The Slauson Middle School principal, Chris Curtis, replied to Udell.]

I agree with the notion that the basic principles of computer science should be generalized more broadly across the curriculum. In many ways, teaching computer and technology skills courses absent a meaningful application of them is ineffective and silly. We wouldn’t teach driver’s education and not let students drive. We don’t teach a “pencil skills class” in which we learn the skills for using this technology tool without an immediate opportunity to apply the skills and then begin to consider and explore the many ways that the pencil and writing change how we organize, perceive, and interact with our world.

I really like the “pencils skills class” example, even though I can think of several readers who may say it applies to some of my writing. And they are probably right, at least in part. I have a definite preference for the theoretical side of things.

To usefully combine theory with praxis is the act of teaching.