Taking the child on a tour through punctuation, Mr. Stops introduces him to a cast of literal “characters”: there is Counsellor Comma, who knows “neither guile nor repentance” in his pursuit of “dividing short parts of a sentence”; Ensign Semicolon struts with militaristic pride, for “into two or more parts he’ll a sentence divide”; and The Exclamation Point is “struck with admiration”, his face “so long, and thin and pale”.
James has penned a sweeping arc from the The Mechanical Turk, Sesame Street, and Teletubbies to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
I think this is beautiful.
James shares his experience of teaching a class of 9 and 10 year old children how to code, and offers some advice:
- Don’t dumb it down
- Use real-world examples
- Make it hands on
- Set clear expectations
- Award certificates and/or stickers
As members of the web community we have a responsibility to share what we have learned. I can’t think of a better way of doing that then helping kids get started.
Hear, hear!
Declan from MakerClub came by the office week and told us all about this great initiative for kids in Brighton that we’re supporting through the BrightSparks programme.
Alan Kay’s initial description of a “Dynabook” written at Xerox PARC in 1972.
A write-up of the BrightSparks programme that Clearleft is taking part in.
Each company agreed to help support one local child from a low-income family, on free school meals or with a yearly household income of under £25k.
Ten years on from Afonso Cuarón’s masterpiece.
This is rather lovely: explore a network of nodes, each of which contains the audio of a child describing a dream.
Inspired by the concept of an 8th continent to which all children belong, RadioEight is an interactive soundscape dedicated to the hidden world of dreams.
Just when I think that I don’t get the point of Medium, along comes Dan to show me the light. This thought-provoking thinkpiece isn’t quite on the same level of his seminal groundbreaking kittens work, but I guarantee it will stay with you.
Sounds like a good exercise for explaining just about anything. Smart.
This was my favourite moment from the Handheld conference in Cardiff.
This is a really well-written and worrying piece that pokes at that oft-cited truism about kids today being “digital natives”:
The parents seem to have some vague concept that spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.
The causes of this lack of digital literacy can be traced back to school:
We’ve mirrored corporate networks, preventing kids and teachers access to system settings, the command line and requiring admin rights to do almost anything. They’re sitting at a general purpose computer without the ability to do any general purpose computing.
Also, this article has the best “TL;DR” description ever.
Josh has been teaching HTML and CSS schoolkids. I love the pages that they’ve made. I really mean it. I genuinely think these are wonderful!
A great short talk from Clare about Code Club.
And this is why Code Club is such a great initiative.
This wouldn’t be appropriate for every site but I still think it could be a damned fine use of otherwise-neglected 404 pages: including information about missing children.
Kids say the mindblowingest things.
A co-working space in Brighton combined with a crèche: such a great idea!
This is an excellent idea: get a whole bunch of after-school code clubs going to teach kids how to code in Scratch.