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Apr 21 2011
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Crafting your education

In the movie Wordplay, all about NY Times Crossword Puzzles, they interview Will Shortz and he talks about how he crafted his own education (a degree in enigmatology).  I was thinking about how crafting  your education can take you many places.

For instance, ever now and then I’ve been know to go on an interview or two… In this day and age people are very focused on asking directed programming puzzles – the classic is the FizzBuzz problem.  Over they years I’ve done so many whiteboard/computer programming puzzles in interviews that I’ve lost track of them.  Everything from string sorting, to multi-threaded deadlock contention.

What I realized last night is that I did craft my education in college to help with these problems.  Sitting at the bottom of my resume is the often overlooked fact that I participated in two different International ACM Programming contests – the second year that I participated we got the Computer Science department to offer a for credit class in programming puzzles.  So, for an entire quarter we worked on short programming problems, under time pressure.  The only downside is that because of rote familiarity with the form, I can be viewed as a little cavalier to the topic…

Looking back, the ability to craft your education, leaves you with some very handy skills.

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Dec 10 2007
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Programming for kids?

Just got done reading Jason Fry’s WSJ article about TV shows for kids, where he discusses Magic School Bus (From PET to Net).  The really thought provoking part is his remising about the commodore PET.  We all wrote programs like this when we were kids.

10 PRINT ‘JASON IS GREAT’
20 GOTO 10
RUN

My personal favorite on the PET was ASCII art graphics to make rocket ships with flames (*** patterns). 

The real thinking part is what about modern computers can make kids have the same sense of discovery that many of us had as kids…  I worry that most kids would look at my ASCII art and wonder why it wasn’t as visually rich as their latest XBOX game.  When kids are drawing pictures of things they go from crude to fairly refined over time (depending on talent/patience/etc..)  Some of that is they start drawing from 2 years old and by the time they are able to think critically about their pictures they’ve already built the base talents. 

When it comes to computers…  by the time you’ve already had a reasonable exposure to software to have higher expectations…  So, how does one go about making software development fun for kids? 

Some of my random ideas:

  • Break out the Apple ][+ from it’s storage and just let them play.  The hard part is there is no community of other kids doing the same exploration.
  • Lego Mindstorms — it’s a cool platform.  But, I have to wonder if the visual programming (data flow model) is just too abstract.  I didn’t have any problem with Muse software’s RobotWars as a kid.
  • LOGO or BASIC — is there any good kid friendly versions of these left around?  Visual basic is way too much for a seven year old.  LOGO has the rapid discovery that’s interesting…
  • KPL, just discovered this from there website it feels like a  modern approach to LOGO/BASIC.
  • Of course there’s always the HTML/AJAX thought…  It’s available it’s something that’s easy to show off.

Other ideas, or experiences…

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