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. 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. 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: With all of the code for KidRuby sitting on GitHub, people are starting to collaborate on it and make more curriculums for your budding rock star developer. ➤ KidsRuby

Teaching kids how to write computer programs, by Marshall Brain by Marshall Brain Quick Intro - If you are looking for a quick and easy way to teach your kid a real programming language, without downloading anything or buying anything, try these Python tutorials. Your kid will be writing and modifying code in just a few minutes. Marshall Brain's quick and easy Python tutorials Let's say that you have children, and you would like to help them learn computer programming at a youngish age. Let's start with a something important: Every kid is different. The second thing to realize is that real analytical skills often don't start appearing until age 11 or 12 or 13 in many kids, so expecting huge breakthroughs prior to that may be unrealistic. That being said, there are lots of fun things you can try as early as five or six... Games Let's start with a few games. Magic Pen (wait a few seconds to see the word "play", then click the word "Play") Fantastic Contraption Auditorium (Drag the circle-with-arrow-in-it around. I love Light Bot. Python for Kids RoboMind

decode - V&A Decode Project The Victoria and Albert Museum has commissioned the artist Karsten Schmidt to design a truly malleable, digital identity for the Decode exhibition by providing it as open source code. We are giving you the opportunity to recode Karsten's work and create your own original artwork. If we love your work it might even become the new Decode identity. Getting started The identity application is fully interactive and can be controlled via mouse, keyboard and a graphical user interface. The application lets you manipulate most parameters in realtime to create a variety of different looks and we encourage you to take the time to experiment to create your own version. A number of the recoded works submitted to us will be chosen by the V&A and CBS to appear on London Underground digital screens to promote the exhibition. Media partner CBS Step 1 Go to the Decode page on Google code: (You're here already! Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Get in touch

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. Let that sink in. They created a "placebo language" called Randomo, whose syntax was randomly generated, to use in trials alongside Quorum and Perl. I asked Andreas Stefik, the paper’s lead author, what design attributes an "evidence-based programming language" like Quorum had that made it easier for novices to use accurately. integer i = 0 repeat 10 times i = i + 1 end That still looks mostly like Greek to me, but Stefik compares it to this equivalent statement in Java ("which is similar to Perl is some ways," he says): for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { } That’s not Greek, it’s Klingon.

KidsRuby 1.0 Released So, you have a son or daughter who is showing some interest in computer programming, but you're not really sure where to start. What to do? Well, as a former high-school computer science teacher, I am here to strongly recommend that you start them off with a scripting language like Ruby or Python. A scripted language tends to be a lot easier to start with than something like Java, C#, C/C++, or any of the other low-level languages out there, which will mean a lot less frustration for junior programmers. And less frustration for the kids means a much better chance that they'll stick with it. As mentioned, Ruby and Python are both excellent choices for a first programming language. In terms of a good starting point for Ruby, it's worth noting that the Ruby community has recently released KidsRuby, a development environment specifically geared toward kids: Happy KidsRuby, We've Gone Version 1.0! At the moment, the KidsRuby environment is available for Windows and Mac OSX.

placebox.es - Placeholders on the fly - simple and 100% free 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. 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. Except D’Aloisio turns out to be a 16-year-old kid from Wimbledon, England who drops phrases like “heuristics” and “natural language processing.” In my life I have met many smart people — Jeff Bezos, Andy Bechtolsheim, Larry Page, Andy Grove, Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla and Bret Taylor. Nick O’ Time Let me share his story. Why? Sentiment is everything

Social Collider: ready to collide 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. 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. As programmers become the backbone of the business world and the tech industry embarks on a bubble-driven hiring blitz, that thinking is going to have to change. It’s a good time to be a developer. The demand starts at the top. While the industry is growing exponentially, it’s also becoming highly segmented. Developers have an attractive menu of options.

Learn to Code with Harvard's Intro to Computer Science Course And Other Free Tech Classes I’ll confess, when it comes to computers, I’m pretty much strictly a user. And these days, with the potential freedom and creatively afforded by open access software, the endless hacks for virtually everything, and the availability of free online computer classes, that seems like kind of a lame admission. So I’m tempted to rectify my programming ignorance by pushing through what promises to be a rigorous intro to computer science, CS50, Harvard’s introductory course for both majors and non-majors alike. The course offers a broad knowledge base to build on, as you can see from the description below: Topics include abstraction, algorithms, encapsulation, data structures, databases, memory management, security, software development, virtualization, and websites. Harvard has made this course available free to anyone---via YouTube, iTunes, and the course page---with a series of lectures filmed during the Fall 2011 semester. Professor Malan has become something of a hot shot at Harvard.