#big design

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First of all, I need to say thank you to several people before I begin. Thank you to the folks behind Big Design. I appreciate the invitation to share my ideas with others. This was my first opportunity to speak at a conference. I am not sure what you saw in me, but I am glad that you gave me this opportunity. Thank you to those who came to my talk. With all of the great options available to you, it is humbling that you chose my session. Finally, thank you to my former professor Cassini Nazir. Without his encouragement I would not have submitted an application to Big Design. He was also influential in my capstone project. I appreciate you guidance and enthusiasm in my work.

If you are at all interested in kids, computers, and learning then I would recommend reading up on Seymour Papert. In particular, pick up a copy of his book Mindstorms. As I said in my talk, the book does not read as though it were written in 1980. The fact that many of his ideas seem so novel and interesting does not speak well to how computers in education have evolved.

Bret Victor’s Learnable Programming was a foundational document to my talk.  Not only is the article worth reading, but be sure to look at the examples of what his ideas would look like. Victor’s Inventing on Principle talk is also well worth your time; this talk set the stage for Learnable Programming and Elm’s time traveling debugger. As a bonus, take a look at Victor’s The Future of Programming. It is not really related to my talk, but I think it is great all the same.

For all things Elm, check out their website. I find their mailing list to be full of polite, responsive, and helpful people. If ever you are stuck with some Elm code, take a look at the mailing list. I would have never finished my capstone project if it were not for them. Elm has a great page to try out the language. There is nothing to install, and you get the benefit of all those great error messages I mentioned.

Finally, I would like to bring Bootstrap to your attention. While my talk mostly mentioned Elm, I think Bootstrap is doing fantastic work. This is my language of choice for the year. I cannot tell you how impressed I am with what they have done. Here are some thoughts I had after attending one of their professional development sessions this summer. I would like to also mention Pyret, which aims to recreate the work of Bootstrap and Racket with a similar curriculum and metaphor but with a more Python-like syntax. It is definitely a project worth watching.