"kids" entries

When can you learn JavaScript?

Khan Academy explores how far learners can get at different ages.

I picked up a brief guide to programming in 6th grade. There, on page 1, was A = A + 1. I knew that wasn’t possible, so I put it down, and came back to programming in 7th grade.

Khan Academy is having better luck with young students, but learning to program is kind of like learning to drive: the prerequisites aren’t obvious, but they’re helpful and often come later. At Fluent 2014, Pamela Fox explored the data Khan Academy has collected on learner age, and what it might mean for curricula going forward.

In her keynote, Fox explored:

  • What the world might look like if JavaScript were part of the curriculum as early as possible. (1:42)
  • Developing a sense of how kids respond to fairly easy challenges with Khan Academy’s participant data. (3:24)
  • What in the first programming challenge might keep people from succeeding? (4:37)
  • How different is the data for a logic challenge? At what age does completion level off? (6:16)
  • What might JavaScript skills enable in a high school curriculum? (8:24)

Read more…

Four short links: 21 August 2014

Four short links: 21 August 2014

Open Data Glue, Smithsonian Crowdsourcing, MIT Family Creativity, and Hardware Owie

  1. Datan open source project that provides a streaming interface between every file format and data storage backend. See the Wired piece on it.
  2. Smithsonian Crowdsourcing Transcription (Smithsonian) — 49 volunteers transcribed 200 pages of correspondence between the Monuments Men in a week. Soon it’ll be mathematics test questions: “if 49 people transcribe 200 pages in 7 days, how many weeks will it take …”
  3. MIT Guide to Family CompSci SessionsThis guide is for educators, community center staff, and volunteers interested in engaging their young people and their families to become designers and inventors in their community.
  4. What to Do When You Screw up 2,000 Orders (SparkFun) — even hardware companies need to do retrospectives.
Four short links: 18 October 2013

Four short links: 18 October 2013

Publishing Bad Research, Reproducing Research, DIY Police Scanner, and Inventing the Future

  1. Science Not as Self-Correcting As It Thinks (Economist) — REALLY good discussion of the shortcomings in statistical practice by scientists, peer-review failures, and the complexities of experimental procedure and fuzziness of what reproducibility might actually mean.
  2. Reproducibility Initiative Receives Grant to Validate Landmark Cancer StudiesThe key experimental findings from each cancer study will be replicated by experts from the Science Exchange network according to best practices for replication established by the Center for Open Science through the Center’s Open Science Framework, and the impact of the replications will be tracked on Mendeley’s research analytics platform. All of the ultimate publications and data will be freely available online, providing the first publicly available complete dataset of replicated biomedical research and representing a major advancement in the study of reproducibility of research.
  3. $20 SDR Police Scanner — using software-defined radio to listen to the police band.
  4. Reimagine the Chemistry Set — $50k prize in contest to design a “chemistry set” type kit that will engage kids as young as 8 and inspire people who are 88. We’re looking for ideas that encourage kids to explore, create, build and question. We’re looking for ideas that honor kids’ curiosity about how things work. Backed by the Moore Foundation and Society for Science and the Public.
Four short links: 28 May 2013

Four short links: 28 May 2013

Geeky Primer, Visible CSS, Remote Working, and Raspberry Pi Sentiment Server

  1. My Little Geek — children’s primer with a geeky bent. A is for Android, B is for Binary, C is for Caffeine …. They have a Kickstarter for two sequels: numbers and shapes.
  2. Visible CSS RulesEnter a url to see how the css rules interact with that page.
  3. How to Work Remotely — none of this is rocket science, it’s all true and things we had to learn the hard way.
  4. Raspberry Pi Twitter Sentiment Server — step-by-step guide, and github repo for the lazy. (via Jason Bell)
Four short links: 18 January 2013

Four short links: 18 January 2013

Audience Fragmentation, Default Passwords, Fabricated Data, and Javascript in Minecraft

  1. Bruce Sterling InterviewIt changed my work profoundly when I realized I could talk to a global audience on the Internet, although I was legally limited from doing that by national publishing systems. The lack of any global book market has much reduced my interest in publishing books. National systems don’t “publish” me, but rather conceal me. This especially happens to writers outside the Anglophone market, but I know a lot of them, and I’ve become sensitized to their issues. It’s one of the general issues of globalization.
  2. bAdmin — database of default usernames and passwords for popular software. (via Reddit /r/netsec)
  3. Just Post It: The Lesson from Two Cases of Fabricated Data Detected by Statistics Alone (Uri Simonsohn) — I argue that requiring authors to post the raw data supporting their published results has, among many other benefits, that of making fraud much less likely to go undetected. I illustrate this point by describing two cases of fraud I identified exclusively through statistical analysis of reported means and standard deviations. Analyses of the raw data behind these provided invaluable confirmation of the initial suspicions, ruling out benign explanations (e.g., reporting errors, unusual distributions), identifying additional signs of fabrication, and also ruling out one of the suspected fraudster’s explanations for his anomalous results. (via The Atlantic)
  4. ScriptCraft — Javascript in Minecraft. Important because All The Kids play Minecraft. (via Javascript Weekly)
Four short links: 3 July 2012

Four short links: 3 July 2012

OpenROV Funded, Teen Surprises, Crowdsourced Net Transparency, and Like Humour

  1. OpenROV Funded in 1 Day (Kickstarter) — an open source robotic submarine designed to make underwater exploration possible for everyone. (via BoingBoing)
  2. McAfee Digital Divide Study (PDF) — lots of numbers showing parents are unaware of what their kids do. (via Julie Starr)
  3. Herdict — crowdsourced transparency to reveal who is censoring what online. (via Twitter)
  4. You Really Really Like Me (NY Times) — cute collection of visual riffs on “like” and “tweet this” iconography. I like my humour pixellated.
Four short links: 24 May 2012

Four short links: 24 May 2012

Maker Tribe, Concept Mapping, Magic Wand, and Site Performance Matters

  1. Last Saturday My Son Found His People at the Maker Faire — aww to the power of INFINITY.
  2. Dictionaries Linking Words to Concepts (Google Research) — Wikipedia entries for concepts, text strings from searches and the oppressed workers down the Text Mines, and a count indicating how often the two were related.
  3. Magic Wand (Kickstarter) — I don’t want the game, I want a Bluetooth magic wand. I don’t want to click the OK button, I want to wave a wand and make it so! (via Pete Warden)
  4. E-Commerce Performance (Luke Wroblewski) — If a page load takes more than two seconds, 40% are likely to abandon that site. This is why you should follow Steve Souders like a hawk: if your site is slower than it could be, you’re leaving money on the table.
Four short links: 10 November 2011

Four short links: 10 November 2011

Access Over Ownership, Retro Programming, Replaying Writing, and Wearable Sensors

  1. Steve Case and His Companies (The Atlantic) — Maybe you see three random ideas. Case and his team saw three bets that paid off thanks to a new Web economy that promotes power in numbers and access over ownership. “Access over ownership” is a phrase that resonated. (via Walt Mossberg)
  2. Back to the Future — teaching kids to program by giving them microcomputers from the 80s. I sat my kids down with a C64 emulator and an Usborne book to work through some BASIC examples. It’s not a panacea, but it solves a lot of bootstrapping problems with teaching kids to program.
  3. Replaying Writing an Essay — Paul Graham wrote an essay using one of his funded startups, Stypi, and then had them hack it so you could replay the development with the feature that everything that was later deleted is highlighted yellow as it’s written. The result is fascinating to watch. I would like my text editor to show me what I need to delete ;)
  4. Jawbone Live Up — wristband that sync with iPhone. Interesting wearable product, tied into ability to gather data on ourselves. The product looks physically nice, but the quantified self user experience needs the same experience and smoothness. Intrusive (“and now I’m quantifying myself!”) limits the audience to nerds or the VERY motivated.
Four short links: 26 January 2010

Four short links: 26 January 2010

Kids Online, Balanced IP Law, Open Haiti Street Maps, and Stages of Social Online Experience

  1. If Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online (NYTimes) — kids aged 8-18 spend, on average, 10 hours/day using smart phone, computer, television, or some other electronic device. (via Hamish MacEwan)
  2. Brazil’s WIPO Proposal on Patent Limitations and Exceptions — well-argued proposal for balanced IP law.

    16.Our experience also illustrates how difficult it is to effectively make use of compulsory licenses. Our pharmaceutical industry took almost two years to develop and produce the licensed patent, because, unfortunately the patent, as granted in Brazil and in other countries, was not sufficiently revealed to allow its production as promptly as desired.

    17.We reserve the right to come back to the discussion of this problem in other documents concerning to what extent the disclosure of patents is preserving (or not) the essentials of the patent system. The question we now pose ourselves is: considering the checks and balances of the patent system, what is the value of a patent if a third party cannot use it when it falls into the public domain or, exceptionally, when its compulsory licensing is deemed necessary?

  3. OpenStreetMaps the Default in Haiti — rescue workers are loading OSM street maps onto GPS units to get street-level detail maps of Haiti. The team members are thrilled to have this resource you have created. I wish you could see their faces ‘light up’ when I take their GPS unit and tell them that I’m going to give them street level detail maps. (via Simon Willison)
  4. We-to-Me Participation (Nina Simon) — useful mental framework for thinking about social software and online experiences, both from the point of view of a cultural institution and for any online activity. Stage one provides people with access to the content that they seek. Stage two provides an opportunity for inquiry and for visitors to take action and ask questions. Stage three lets people see where their interests and actions fit in the wider community of visitors to the institution. Stage four helps visitors connect with particular people—staff members and other visitors—who share their content and activity interests. Stage five makes the entire institution feel like a social place, full of potentially interesting, challenging, enriching encounters with other people.