Teaching kids (girls) to code

Last week I spent an hour just watching my seven-year-old-daughter learn how to program computers.

She wasn’t actually writing code, but in just an hour she learned the basics of code by designing skating patterns for Anna and Elsa, the popular characters from Frozen.

Code with Anna and Elsa uses Blockly, which is a visual programming editor. It lets users create programs with a simple and intuitive interface.

My daughter moved blocks around to create the logic of her program. To have Elsa create a straight line on the ice, for example, she placed a block that said “move forward by 100 pixels”. She was able to modify the parameters within that block, from 100 to 300, to have Elsa skate out a longer line if she wanted.

Other blocks, to have Elsa turn, for example, were then added to make a more complicated program.

After completing one of the tasks, she was able to see the actual code that she had created using Blockly. So she could see what the text looked like that got Elsa skating forward: moveForward(100);

The project comes from Code, “a non-profit dedicated to expanding participation in computer science by making it available in more schools, and increasing participation by women and underrepresented students of color. Our vision is that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer science.”

The podcast gets reinvented, and it’s a revelation

If you’re still thinking that all podcasts are terribly recorded conversations between two or more inane, self-involved dimwits, then pay attention. Because while there have been a number of great podcasts since the term was first introduced in 2004, the bar has just been raised.

Serial is a podcast from the creators of the smart This American Life. Each season the show “unfolds” a true story with weekly episodes, presented in radio documentary format. Episodes range from about 40 minutes to an hour in length, and each episode is self-contained, but builds on the episodes that came before, in the same way that Charles Dickens published his novels in instalments before they were printed as books.

The first season attempts to get to the truth of a murder that took place in January 1999, deconstructing recorded police interviews, trial transcripts, and by interviewing people involved with the case, and trying to reconstruct the events that occurred.
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According to Apple, Serial set a record for being the first podcast to 5 million downloads, and if you’ve heard even a snippet of an episode you’ll understand why. Executive producer and host Sarah Koenig is truly unravelling the story of what happened on the day Baltimore high school student Hae Min Lee was killed. Nine episodes in and I still don’t know if Adnan Syed is guilty of murder or not. I can’t be sure that the mystery of what happened will actually be solved by the time season one ends.

A second season of Serial has been guaranteed due to the support of listeners.

New episodes are released every Thursday. Episode 10 of season one will be available tomorrow, December 4.

Have you ever been to space, Billy?

“Wanderers” is a short film by Erik Wernquist. The Swedish animator and digital artist imagines our expansion into the solar system.

Wernquist shows us a glimpse of what it might be like to see a space elevator dropping down to the surface of Mars. Or to see Jupiter, Saturn, or Uranus close in the sky above us on the surface of a moon.

The video is set to an audio recording of astronomer Carl Sagan reading his book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, and it’s a perfect pairing. Sagan, the creator and host of Cosmos: A Personal Journey, was a brilliant thinker and overt humanist who had the talent to turn a poetic phrase.

In Contact, when Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) is on her adventure through space, she says, “They should’ve sent a poet.” For me, Carl is who the writers were referring to.