Tag Archives: coding

Primo Is An Arduino Robot That Teaches Kids Programming Logic Through Play [Kickstarter] | TechCrunch

Posted on by

Dan Shapiro’s Robot Turtles board game Kickstarter showed there is serious appetite for kids’ games that aren’t just fun to play with but also sneakily teach core coding principles. Instead of the $25,000 he was aiming for, Shapiro raised more than $630,000. Geeky moms and dads clearly have money, and will spend it on the right bit of educational kit.

With that kind of Kickstarter community response, it’s pretty likely we’re set to see a wave of educational toys doing cool fun stuff with programming principles. To wit, meet Primo: a physical programming interface that teaches children programming logic while they control the movements of an Arduino-powered robot.

Read: Primo Is An Arduino Robot That Teaches Kids Programming Logic Through Play | TechCrunch.

A Girl Who Codes | Fast Company

Posted on by

A Girl Who Codes | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

Computing has always been a boys’ club. How 18-year-old nikita rau–and other young women like her–are finally changing that.

Read: A Girl Who Codes | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

News: Education & Technology, Librarianship

Posted on by

Education & Technology

The LA Times Trolls Innocent Teachers | TechCrunch
The once-respectable LA Times is leveraging its dwindling platform to attack individual teachers under the guise of data transparency. The editorial board won a court case allowing them to use a highly contentious, self-designed algorithm to rank the best and worst teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Neither the suicide of one of the shamed teachers, nor the widespread criticism of the statistical methods have aroused the editorial board’s better judgment.

Google Earth Tour Builder lets you tell stories through maps | Engadget
Google has used Earth and Maps to tell tales of unfolding tragedies and soldiers fighting for our country. Now its opening up those tools to the public, allowing users to build what they’re calling “Tours” through Google Earth. Tour Builder was released in honor of Veterans Day and it allows users to create narratives tied to points on a map. More Google news: Google Quick Actions Let Users Act on Emails Without Opening Them | Mashable, Your Face and Name Will Appear in Google Ads Starting Today | Gizmodo and Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won | theguardian

Librarianship

Seven Ways To Use GitHub That Aren’t Coding | ReadWrite

Posted on by

GitHub is so often touted as a tool for coding projects that it’s easy to forget just how useful a resource it is for everything else.

At the heart of GitHub are two collaborative functions—forking and branching—that aren’t exclusive to coding. Forking means to create a clone of somebody else’s work for remixing. Branching is a way for each person in a group to create a temporary clone for tandem editing, and then push those updates back to the group project again.

While many of GitHub’s capabilities require knowledge of Git…forking and branching can both be done with nothing more than a GitHub account and a few clicks. GitHub has the additional benefit of a liberal use policy, so you are in complete control of anything you upload there.

The 7 ways discussed:

  1. Travel Logging
  2. Musical Composition
  3. Remixing Recipes
  4. Open Source Font Editing
  5. Data Visualization For Journalists
  6. Writing and Blogging
  7. Legal Documents

Read: Seven Ways To Use GitHub That Aren’t Coding | ReadWrite.

You may also like:

From Scratch to Tynker: Tools to Teach Kids How to Code | The Digital Shift

Posted on by

Learning to code is a popular topic in educational circles these days. For good reason. When young people code their own apps, games, stories, or websites they have a chance to think critically, troubleshoot, problem solve, and collaborate. It’s a way to create something real that can be seen and used by lots of different people.

Of course, not all teachers or library staff are proficient coders. But, we don’t have to be. There are several apps and Web-based tools that make it possible to learn, with kids, the basics of coding. These also give young people the chance to try things out on their own and even teach adults how to create with code.

Sceencast tutorials for Daisy the Dinosaur, Hopscotch, Scratch and Tynker. Read: From Scratch to Tynker: Tools to Teach Kids How to Code | The Digital Shift.

Life with Raspberry Pi: Sparking a School Coding Revolution | The Digital Shift

Posted on by

Our classroom glows with activity. One kid drafts a how-to article in which he explains the steps involved in wiring a cardboard Minecraft controller. Another writes a branching-path, choose-your-own-adventure story in Twine, a free, downloadable interactive fiction app. A student who’s claimed throughout his middle-school career that he isn’t a writer leans close to his laptop screen, finding and fixing coding errors. He composes, compiles, and debugs more than 100 lines of code to light up a three-by-three-light LED display plugged into his laptop.

A pair of especially curious students sits huddled around our newest computer, an exposed-faced circuit board smaller than a paperback book. It’s called a Raspberry Pi. They’re watching how the code they write in one window changes the course of a game in another. They may not know it yet, but these kids are playing with an open-source computing platform that just might change the way we teach young people how to interact with computers.

Read: Life with Raspberry Pi: Sparking a School Coding Revolution | The Digital Shift.

5 Reasons to Teach Kids To Code [Infographic] | Kodable

Posted on by

5 Reasons to Teach Kids To Code | Kodable

5 reasons to tech kids to code

General Assembly Launches Dash, A Tool For Coding Newbies | TechCrunch

Posted on by

As General Assembly moves away from co-working and focuses more heavily on educating entrepreneurs and startups, the company is releasing a brand new tool to the public. It’s called Dash, and it’s an interactive online program that helps teach people how to code through a series of interactive storyline-based tutorials.

via General Assembly Launches Dash, A Tool For Coding Newbies | TechCrunch.

You may also like: Dash: Learning To Code by Building Websites | Information Space

Gates, Zuck, Dorsey chip in to teach 10M students coding | CNET News

Posted on by

While computer programming and coding are becoming more common K-12 class options, these subject matters are still a mystery to many students. A nonprofit called Code.org is trying to change that by enlisting a star-studded entourage of techies to help with its new “Hour of Code” campaign.

The goal of Hour of Code is to introduce computer programming to 10 million K-12 students in the US during Computer Science Education Week. The event happens December 9 to 15[, 2013].

Joining the cause are several individuals, such as long-time philanthropist Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Companies are also supporting the initiative, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, and others.

via Gates, Zuck, Dorsey chip in to teach 10M students coding | Internet & Media | CNET News

Also See: Gates, Zuckerberg Back Code.org’s Mission To Bring Computer Science To Every School | FastCompany

News: SCSL Social Media Library Launched, 10 Libraries Receive Grant, New Software Code Library, Favorite Gothic Romance Novels

Posted on by

South Carolina State Library Launches Social Media Library and Archive | The Digital Shift
The South Carolina State Library (SCSL) has launched the South Carolina State Agency Social Media Library, a new project that will archive all tweets, Facebook posts, and YouTube content generated by the official accounts of South Carolina’s state agencies while simplifying public access to this social media activity via a single online portal at scsocialmedialibrary.org. The portal and the archive were developed in collaboration with ArchiveSocial, a for-profit social media archiving company based in Durham, NC. It follows a similar effort launched by the State Archives of North Carolina less than a year ago.

Ten ‘enterprising libraries’ receive grant | The Bookseller
Ten library services around the country will receive a share of £450,000 designed to help promote business and entrepreneurship. The scheme has been established by Arts Council England (ACE), the British Library and the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Ex-Amazon Engineer Builds Library for World’s Software Code | WIRED
Kumar created a service called Runnable, a means of finding and using all the software “building blocks” that are freely available across the web.

My Favorite Gothic Romance Novels | HuffPost Books
Reviews 7 gothic novels.

Though lighter on the romance, I would add The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and Sepulchre by Kate Mosse to the list. Did you know Louise May Alcott wrote gothic short stories? She did! Take a look at A Whisper in the Dark by the author. A collection of gothic novellas no longer under copyright.