Montreal Kids 9-12 willing to learn some HTML Sought For Computer Science Study, Saturday February 8

Kids Code Jeunesse/ McGill control group for HTML:  9-12 yr olds 
 
Your child will be learning a condensed version of our HTML classroom course lessons (minus Intro to computers, debugging, class collaboration and presentation). 
 
We want to observe the learning difference between kids learning to code in a collaborative classroom setting with experts (which is what we do in schools) vs learning independently with minimal guidance. The control group will be learning with minimal guidance, lead by Maude Lemaire, a McGill software engineer. After the control lesson is complete, if the children haven’t completed their project, we have time at the end of the day to make sure they do!
 
Date:
Saturday February 8th 
 
Time:
10-10:30 arrival 
4:-5pm departure
 
Location:
Room 3070
3630 University St.
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 0C6
 
Please bring a packed lunch. Snacks and drinks will be available throughout the day. And please bring:
Highlighter
Notebook/ paper
Pen/Pencil
 
Computers will be onsite. 
 
Parents are welcome to stay (and learn!) or return for pickup at 4pm.
 
Course is available in English and in French. Instructors are bilingual.
 
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. To confirm:
 
Best regards,
Kate
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It’s Computer Science Education Week

Go Shakira!

Mile End Hour of Code

Another co-worker in the Montreal Mother trade, learning and teaching code!

Lina Branter

For the past year, I have been increasingly convinced that every kid should learn to code. Since I have daughters and I work at an all-girls’ school, my interest tends to lean toward getting girls interested in programming, but I guess boys can still learn too (before you get your knickers in a knot- I was kidding! Of course, boys should learn too. But not frogs. They would have to invent a flipper friendly keyboard).

Here are some of my talking points on this subject:

  1. Computers are ubiquitous in our life
  2. Yet most of us have no idea how they work
  3. It is going to be increasingly necessary to know how they work even if you are not in a computer science field.
  4. Yet learning how to program is not part of our curriculum
  5. Many of the most interesting, flexible and highly paid jobs are in computer science
  6. Yet the…

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Video

Celebrate Computer Science Education week with An Hour Of Code

Anyone know how to get this to Miley Cyrus?

Video

Google gets its piece of the Raspberry Pi

Google had just launched a program to turn the Raspberry Pi into a mini web server. Download this code onto an SD card and the Pi becomes an educational tool to teach kids the basics of app coding.

Your Move, Pal

Me, staring down some Python…

Library codecamp for teens

Something we need to be seeing more of: a library offering a coding day camp for teenagers.

Last week the Chatanooga public library set forth on its summer day camp for teenagers learning code. After some enterprising Chatanoogans (Pythanoogans?) had success with a project called Community Py, an eight week course teaching Python to adults and teenagers, they applied for a grant for a more intensive summer session.

One 40,000 grant later, they had 55 Chromebooks and enough money to pay instructors and teaching assistants.

Now all they need, according to organizers, is more girls.

Bye bye Codecademy, MIT shows off a way to program using natural language

Gigaom

What if you could learn to code just by learning a few commands that match the way we speak or write?

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology have shown off that for a few tasks, such as tweaking word processing documents and spreadsheets, people could use natural language as opposed to specific programming languages. As we spend more time in our digital worlds, making the manipulation of that world easier for everyone is the goal behind several startups such as IFTTTCodecademy or even ARB Labs, and is an essential ingredient for further breakthroughs.

The researchers in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory demonstrated their findings using productivity software, but their methods might also work for other programming tasks. While it’s not exactly clear from the MIT release how this will work in practice, it’s awesome that such research is even happening. Giving more people the…

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Using Raspberry Pi in class

I’m inspired…

teachcomputing.wordpress.com

IMG_6441_2A practical guide for using Raspberry Pi in class –

This is a modified version of an article I was asked to write for The Guardian Teacher Network.

What exactly is the Raspberry Pi?

Computer Science pioneer, Seymour Papert wrote, “The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge”. The credit-card sized, low-powered Raspberry Pi computer, costing about the same price as a textbook (£18) is one tool that can be used to help create these conditions. Designed and manufactured in the UK, the aim of this computer is to encourage children to tinker and experiment with computing technology at a very low financial risk, but offering massive educational value in return. The unconventional, bare-bones appearance of the Raspberry Pi computer frequently prompts more questions than it answers. In education, that is surely a good thing, for outstanding teaching is more…

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Code Year, Eighteen Months Later

Eighteen months ago, in January of 2012,  I decided to sign up for Codecademy’s Code Year. I wasn’t even sure what code was. But I had some time on my hands and an eleven year old son who was curious too. I was getting less and less work at the newspaper I’d been freelancing at for the last twenty years. And though I didn’t know it at the time, The Montreal Mirror was six months from folding.

In April, after I’d triumphantly (to me at least) familiarized myself with the fundamentals of JavaScript, I had a tiny twitter spat with Jeff Atwood over his now infamous post “Please Don’t Learn To Code.” Jeff, who runs the popular blog Stack Overflow,  didn’t believe that people should learn to code just for code’s sake.  He’d seen too much bad code, broken dreams, and faux programmers in his career to jump on the code learning bandwagon.

I get it. I’m a writer. I’ve heard many versions of this argument applied to writing (too many people taking writing courses to write books that nobody will read, etc.) Still, I have an intractable belief in the adventure of learning. So, I tossed off a counter post, which eventually made it into an e-book anthology, “Should You Learn To Code”, with other people who disagreed with Jeff.

When The Mirror  closed without warning, in June of 2012, it also closed fifteen years of archives, and a huge chunk of my professional portfolio. At least I had my blog. And even more free time. Before this employment crisis, I’d slapped together a little password creating app for for my son after his facebook account got hacked.  That was fun, so I’d signed up for Coursera/Stanford’s Human Computer Interaction course determined to get the studio track certificate in app prototyping.

By the end of July, I’d accomplished this (with distinction!).  I learned not just about design, but got some insights into the cognitive science that the top software engineers work with. I not only had a better idea of how apps work, but how the modern brain deals and doesn’t deal, with the constant potential for information overload.

Meanwhile,  back at Codecademy,  I was struggling through JQuery, hating the virtual checkers project, but doing it anyways. By the end of the summer, I still hadn’t figured out what I was going to do with all my new found functional literacy.  I couldn’t seem to settle on a particular project.

I discovered a Montreal enterprise, PressBooks, that had ingeniously hacked WordPress and turned it into a free multiplatform book writing app.  As an exercise in mastering it, I  wrote a first chapter and an outline for a book about my adventure in code. I’m not part of the kickstarter generation, so I went old school and wrote up a grant proposal for the Quebec Arts Council about a writer learning to code, trying to figure out her place in this new technologically complicated world.

This brought me to September when Codecademy introduced the Python track. I thought JQuery was tough, but it was nothing like the resistance I was feeling towards Python. My savings and credit were running out. Jeff Atwood was starting to make a lot of sense. What had I been THINKING, a middle aged single mother, learning code just for the sake of learning code.  Why was I still doing this?  I had no interest in being the relatively old lady at a start-up. I’m temperamentally ill suited to office work, so  I had no authentic desire to put these skills to practical use in the business world.  Every time I talked to another writer, or any  publishing professional, about what I was doing, they looked at me like I had lost my freaking mind.

I’d hit a wall. I could have so easily quit here. Not learn Python. No one would have been the wiser. But I’d gotten this far in my resolution. I needed to finish this marathon, or all the struggle I’d suffered through would be for nothing. So, I plugged away at Python, learning to, if not to love it, at least like it.

Until I got to list comprehensions. At which point, like anyone who has ever made it to list comprehensions, my mind opened. How could I not feel a tenderness towards this magnificent language, so ugly and incomprehensible  to everyone else, so elegant and rich with potential to anyone who understood it. On that day, towards the end of my code year, my grinchy writer’s heart grew to two sizes, and for a short while even my apartment seemed bigger.

Yes it bothered me, a lot, that for the first time in my twenty year career as a freelancer, I soon might not be able to make my credit card payments. But another part of me felt impenetrably calm. I remember an interview I once saw with Jada Pinkett Smith on Oprah, explaining why peformance anxiety never got to her as an aspiring teenage actress. She’d been to the High School of the Performing Arts, she’d work hard.  There was no reason to be nervous, she explained, because “I had a-bi-li-ties.”

No matter the stresses that seemed to be on the horizon,  I couldn’t seem to shake the confidence that inevitably comes with valued skills and knowledge. In mid-December, just as I got to the point where I thought I might be delusional, I got a letter informing that I’d received the book grant I’d applied for. Not the kind of money one would get for a start up. But the writing life has a pretty low overhead, so it was enough to keep me solvent for another year.

It was also around that time that I learned about the first meeting of Montreal Girl Hackers. It was at Notman House, a slightly dilapidated mansion in the heart of downtown Montreal that had recently been turned into a government subsidized tech incubator.  There were about thirty or so women of varying ages, backgrounds,  interests and skill levels, from computer science teachers to beginners. There was free beer and food, financed by Google and/or  Shopify, I’m not quite sure which.  We stood in a circle and talked about what had brought us here.  I told my story.  Everyone clapped.  It was lovely.

About  a month later I got an e-mail from the organizer. She’d remembered that I’d recently learned some Python and was wondering If I’d be interested in helping out at a weekend workshop organized by the Montreal Python community to teach women some introductory Python skills.

Of course! There I took my first steps out of the sandbox and learned how to set up my own Python environment.  I went over the basics again, learned a bit more through teaching, and hacked a few projects.  It was like any other gathering of women learning a skill, except for instead of the usual pot luck that women always obligate themselves to, there was that free take out again.  I went to a follow up meeting a few weeks later.  More free beer and food, the origins of which were not entirely clear to me yet.  But they soon would be.

Montreal, it turns out, had been chosen to host PyCon, the North American conference of all things and people Python, not just for 2014 , but 2015 as well.  At the last PyCon there had been some controversy over a sexist remark, so Python HQs decision to buy a lot of Montreal women free dinner whenever they got together to learn Python, seemed a wise one.  They were interested in kids too.  Apparently at the last PyCon, everyone had walked away with a free Raspberry Pis.

So here I now am, a little over eighteen months since I signed up for Code Year, taking some time to reflect.

Since January,  I’ve pulled back from my blog to get  focussed on the history and theory behind these skills. With research, I have a better sense of the bigger picture.  I’m working my way through those codecademy lessons again with a slightly more sophisticated eye than I had back when I was half parroting my way through. I’m working at writing the kind of book I wish I’d had when I started.  Something that would inspire newbies to keep at it, and help them better understand their place in the master narrative of computer science.  Something that doesn’t get too tangled up trying to explain the things that they might not be ready to learn yet, but that glimmers with enough light to help them blunder their own way through. Something guided, I hope, by the proverbial finger that directs us to the moon.

I’m reading Tim Berner-Lee’s memoir and just learned that his mother Mary Woods was one of the programmers on the Ferranti Mark 1, the first commercial computer in England. Back then, as in the U.S., women made up roughly fifty percent of programmers.  His parents met at a Christmas party about a year into the project.

Some of those early programmers learned to code because they had a specific job to do. And usually that was the best way. But not everyone learns like this.  According to Grace Hopper, inventor of the first compiler, it took her two years to get her male peers to even look what she had created. They were so enamored with the snippets of code they were playing with. True, none of them can take credit for the compiler, but obviously it led them to other stuff.  I’m not against projects based learning. But I put a year aside to learn to code for code’s sake and doing so has  led to me places and projects I had no idea even existed eighteen months ago.

Fortunately, I have little shame about my newbie perspective. Maybe one day I’ll learn to worry more about all the time I “waste” learning.  I have no idea what I’m going to have experienced or learned eighteen months from now. But if it’s only half as interesting and fun as everything I’ve learned in the last eighteen months, I’ll still consider myself on the right track.