391–400 of 434 posts
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I find it hard to understand those rules. What country did you grow up in?
Rural America. Conservative religious family. As far as that sort of situation goes, my particular situation was not even particularly extreme. At least they did not make an attempt to censor what books I could read.
themade.org teaches free programming classes to kids. We've been doing this for 2 years now, and most of the time, our ratios are 50/50. Yesterday, in fact, we had 3 boys and 6 girls for our scratch class, then had 8 girls and 2 boys for our interactive fiction class, taught in Twine. Couple things we've learned. First, girls default to pair programming. They cluster, they work together, when they have a problem, the…
Sadly, my two daughters seem really rather interested in the whole affair (probably one two many nudges from dad in the past).
One thing about Minecraft though, even if kids can't make mods, they can learn useful aspects of logic just from playing about when redstone. When my daughter managed to make a set of points that switched automatically when her roller-coaster cart went over a pressure plate, she was well chuffed.
There is a broader point that we no longer have the open source community we once had. It was about filling every thing with good open source software - be it desktop, server, embedded. On desktop there was a variety of DEs, distributions, software and all that stuff. There was hope that open source will win. But nowdays I see open source largely as a server side movement powering large proprietary platforms. Everybo…
There is a broader point that we no longer have the open source community we once had. I think this may be one of the more tragic results of the 2000-2010 decade. Where have the developers gone, and how could we get them back?
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Yep. I wouldn't be much of a technologist if not for computer games (to get me onto the computer), and vast quantities of unsupervised and unfiltered internet at a formative age.
WTF is a technologist?
I'm torn. I think she makes some really good points -- particularly about discouraging young girls and the futility of shoving adult humans into foreign social situations -- but I also think she might be rather narrowly defining the personality type of a "hacker", and dismissing behaviors that she doesn't find valuable (in her words: "ephemera -- popularity, beauty and fitting in" ). Maybe it's possible that there ar…
> it makes me think: this might be a problem. Is it harder to be a hacker if you > also have an interest in social media and graphic design and popularity and > friendships? Are we defining "hacker" to include only people with bad social > skills and no interest outside of technology? I hope not. I never said any such thing. I didn't say "you are pretty, what are you doing here?". I said: >> you're not a programmer,…
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>Which feminist told you to dress or look a certain way? In my experience, feminists are more obsessed with making sure other women are dressed "correctly" than just about any other demographic outside of conservative christian republicans. Have you never read an article by a feminist about X or Y movie character is demeaning to women because she dressed too sexy, or wore something that the feminist herself would nev…
> In my experience, feminists are more obsessed with making sure other women are dressed "correctly" than just about any other demographic outside of conservative christian republicans. Dress and body policing of women is a reflection of misogyny, of which women and men both participate. However, it is definitely wrong to do so whether one considers themselves feminist or not. > Have you never read an article by a fe…
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>Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do The draw of programming for me was that I do could do interesting work and create something all by myself , by the force of my own mind. I loved it largely because I could do it independently, without mommy and daddy steering. I would have lost interest quickly had it been supervised. There aren't many other creative activities like that - h…
I almost posted exactly the same post as simias earlier, your post worries me a bit as you don't seem to understand there's been generations of hackers who had no internet access. I learnt programming on my school computers in lunch times and on a graphical calculator. I really didn't have much interest in programming at home. It almost feels like you didn't read the article, the author talks about more generic probl…
Just because the internet wasn't accessible 30 years ago isn't a reason to restrict it in the future. The basic methods of learning are totally different today.. Librarys in financial woes. Wifi at Mcdonalds. Cell Phones for everyone. I know my local libraries don't have any of the information I enjoy reading about.
>>And there are a lot of people who are affected by watching people hang.
And your child shouldn't be wanting to watch those videos.
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Ahh, but it wasn't magic...as you go on to say, the seeds were planted when you were young. "messing with radios and old VHS players" is a precursor to becoming a good technologist. It's not about what you played with, it's about early experiences of problem solving, of making and/or fixing and/or tinkering in any context.
>but it wasn't magic No. I'm also not an world-class tennis player even though I played tennis since I was able to hold a racket and had good teachers. I just happen to be good at problem solving, making and fixing and tinkering. Most of friends who were at school who liked to build things also went on to have technical careers, just not with computer programming. So, I think that we are only starting to see a new ge…
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Criticizing how fictional women are dressed is not the same as criticizing how real-life women are dressed. When a man draws or designs a female character with "sexy" clothing, it's likely sexualizing that character for male viewers to ogle. When a woman decides to dress that way, it's personal expression. When I see feminist criticisms of how female characters are dressed, they're not criticizing three dimensional a…
>Criticizing how fictional women are dressed is not the same as criticizing how real-life women are dressed. Who do you think portrays them on tv and in movies? Fake women? Give me a break. >When a man draws or designs a female character with "sexy" clothing, it's likely sexualizing that character for male viewers to ogle. When a woman decides to dress that way, it's personal expression. I like how if a man does it,…
I think these sorts of differences in perspective are common to people in general. Some of it is jealously, but a lot of it is simply a failure to understand or take into consideration the viewpoint of the piece.
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You're right, Java is not hard. But I'd wager you paid for that summer camp. We teach a free class to random kids every week. Because it's free, random kids with NO PRIOR COMPUTER KNOWLEDGE show up. This is quite different from a kid who grew up in a house with a computer, an iPad, and a dad who's a programmer. We deal with kids who've never touched a computer before, and only understand phones. When those kinds of k…
I'm sorry if I came off as saying Scratch was a bad idea. My kids got started, when they were much younger, on Scratch. A good place I think to go here would be a CraftBukkit "framework", something that would make a series of simple plugins easier to write for people with minimal programming ability. That's how the Java camp was taught: with a game framework that required a few specific pieces of programming to fill…