Tag Archives: programming

Community Is Key to Successful Library Maker Spaces | The Digital Shift

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The most important resource for creating a successful library maker space—whether in a school or public library—is one’s own community, according to librarians Justin Hoenke, Amy Koester, and Michelle Cooper. Strong relationships and community involvement, not big budgets and high-tech gadgetry, are key to reaching children and teens, the trio of makers say.

The experts shared details of their programming for kids and their top maker strategies during “The Community Joins In: Library Maker Spaces,” a midday session of The Digital Shift: Reinventing Libraries (#TDS13) webcast on October 16, moderated by Hoenke, the new teen librarian at the Chattanooga (TN) Public Library and 2013 Library Journal Mover &  Shaker. And since the event, the trio has created a Pinterest page filled with maker space advice, links, and takeaways.

Read more: Community Is Key to Successful Library Maker Spaces | The Digital Shift.

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

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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

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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

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5 Reasons to Teach Kids To Code | Kodable

5 reasons to tech kids to code

Screw Teaching Your Kids–Get This Robot Instead | Co.Labs

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Gupta set out to find a way to teach very young children the basics of coding–sequences of instructions, subroutines, events, conditional statements–in a playful way. Today Play-i launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise $250,000 to manufacture two kid-friendly robots called Bo and Yana, which teach high-level programming concepts to children as as young as five.

Read more: Screw Teaching Your Kids–Get This Robot Instead ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community.

If We Want More Ada Lovelaces, We Need to Empower Women | Mashable

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This week we celebrate Ada Lovelace, a woman from the 1800s who invented computer programming at a time when no one knew what a computer was.

While her contributions are vast, I can’t help but imagine how much she may have impacted society had she been properly educated. And then I begin to think about how important it is to recognize the movements and groups that educate and offer opportunities to women.

Read the full story: If We Want More Ada Lovelaces, We Need to Empower Women | Mashable.

Related: Wiki editing session at Brown University recognizes women in science | Brown University

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

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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

GitHub For Beginners: Commit, Push And Go [PART 2 of 2] | ReadWrite

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In Part 1 of this two-part GitHub tutorial, we examined the main uses for GitHub and began the process of signing up for a GitHub account and creating our own local repository for code. Now that these steps have been accomplished, let’s add the first part of your project now by making your first commit to GitHub.

Read: GitHub For Beginners: Commit, Push And Go [PART 2 of 2] | ReadWrite

Related: GitHub For Beginners: Don’t Get Scared, Get Started [PART 1 of 2] | ReadWrite

GitHub For Beginners: Don’t Get Scared, Get Started [PART 1 of 2] | ReadWrite

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It’s 2013, and there’s no way around it: you need to learn how to use GitHub. 

Why? Because it’s a social network that has completely changed the way we work. Having started as a developer’s collaborative platform, GitHub is now the largest online storage space of collaborative works that exists in the world. Whether you’re interested in participating in this global mind meld or in researching this massive file dump of human knowledge, you need to be here.

Read: GitHub For Beginners: Don’t Get Scared, Get Started  [PART 1 of 2] | ReadWrite.

Google Launches Web Designer, A Visual Tool For Building Interactive HTML5 Sites And Ads | TechCrunch

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Google today announced the launch of Web Designer, a new tool for building interactive HTML5 sites and ads. The company first hinted at this launch in June, but had been quiet about it ever since. Web Designer, which Google calls a “professional-quality design tool,” is now officially in public beta and available for download for Mac and Windows.

Read: Google Launches Web Designer, A Visual Tool For Building Interactive HTML5 Sites And Ads | TechCrunch.