#code literacy

In the same way that composition and comprehension are not tied to paper, modeling is not tied to computers. It can be both physical and mental. It takes place on paper and in Excel or with Legos and balsa wood airplanes. It is an incredibly powerful skill which we can make even greater use of by transposing our models to computers.

Watch President Obama write his first line of code

Dubbed "Coder in Chief," Barack Obama is being described as the first US president to dabble in computer programming. After kicking off the 2014 Computer Science Education Week with a call to code, Obama joined an "Hour of Code" event, an international campaign that aims to show how much an hour of programming can amount to.

Klint Finley

New from me at Wired, meet revisit.link, the “Hello World” of web services:

Basically, all the site’s image effects are stored by a community of developers, much like any other open source software. Anyone can not only use these effects, but build their own and share them with the community by way of the code hosting and collaboration site GitHub. “Since everyone likes glitch art and animated GIFs, it’s a creative outlet for developers to create something new that’s outside their usual field,” say Jen Fong-Adwent, the creator of revisit.link. “But it’s also a way for new people to learn basics.”

If you’re building a modern web service, you aren’t just creating a program that will run on one machine. You have to learn how to deploy code to online servers, and teach your programs to talk with other applications. revisit.link is a good way to learn these skills, since the effects servers are simple and lightweight and can be written in any language. And once a server is built, the developer can learn how to use GitHub and how to make small changes to someone else’s code and submit those changes for review—all in a low-pressure environment with a very low barrier to entry.

Full Story: Out in the Open: How Animated GIFs Can Turn You Into a Web Coder

You can play with it here, or view a strea, of examples here.

Klint Finley

New from me at Wired:

Minecraft is incredibly open-ended. It’s entirely up you whether you as a player whether spend your time building elaborate castles, fighting monsters, or exploring the the game world. What’s more, using mods, you can quickly create things that would otherwise take a long time to build in the game, such as mountains or massive dungeons, or create custom types of blocks. You can also create special rules that enable you to do things like build your own games within Minecraft, such as capture the flag or Tetris.

Once the kids have crafted their code in LearnToMod, the application connects to their Minecraft account to make the mods available to the kids in the game. By teaching kids to build their own Minecraft mods, the ThoughSTEM team is hoping to keep students motivated to learn some of the trickier parts of coding.

TeacherGaming founder Joel Levin is fond of the idea. “Kids are passionate about the game and they quickly understand that they can extend and enhance their Minecraft experience by learning some basic programming,” he says. “And that’s really what we want, isn’t it? To have kids realize that with code, they can improve their life in a way that’s relevant to them.”

In fact, Levin says TeacherGaming is working on its own mod building education program called ComputerCraftEdu, which will eventually be offered both online and in-person. And there are already a few other classes that teach students to create mods, such as MakersFactory’s class in Santa Cruz and YouthDigital’s online class.

Full Story: Wired: New Minecraft Mod Teaches You Code as You Play

Klint Finley

My latest piece for TechCrunch:

This week President Barack Obama rekindled a couple of the Internet’s favorite debates: whether it’s appropriate to take selfies at funerals, and whether everyone should learn to code.

As part of Computer Science Education Week, Obama delivered a YouTube address titled “President Obama calls on every American to learn code.” [...]

But I think we can all agree that learning programming shouldn’t detract from other educational objectives, like reading, writing and math. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to. In fact, it can be combined with other skills.

How important is the ability to code to the work of an interaction designer? This is something that I have been thinking and talking about for quite some time now. Having moved into the interaction design world from the field of architecture, I had always equated this question with something I spent a good deal thinking about during my last job. How important is it for architects and designers to understand structural engineering? While I certainly do not think that Architects and designers need to possess a mastery of this subject (after all, structural engineers need jobs too) I have always believed that the best architects are the ones who understand it to the point that they can use it to inform and articulate design decisions.

This is how I had always approached the notion of code literacy for interaction designers. That designers should, at the very least, understand how the technical components of a given project will come together to support its design. What I am quickly beginning to realize however, is that this was a rather simplistic reason for learning how to code. The true benefit of leaning code is more akin to the ability to use 3d Modeling tools in architecture. That is, the ability to prototype. 

I covered the Khan Academy's new interactive programming tutorials for Wired:

Since 2006 the Khan Academy, named for its founder Salman Khan, has provided free video lectures on subjects such as mathematics, biology and history. As we’ve reported before Khan garnered praise from the likes of Bill Gates (whose foundation invested $1.5 million in the site), but other have been more critical of the lecture-driven approach. Thus far the site has only included prerecorded lectures that offered no feedback or interaction.

That’s changing today with Khan Academy’s new computer science section.

The tutorials are interactive and live entirely in the browser. Instead of a video, each lesson contains a pane on the left side for students to enter code and a pane on the right that displays the output. The first lesson walks students through the process of writing code that will draw a face in the right pane. After learning to generate graphics, students work up to animation and eventually to games, such as a Pac-Man clone.

Rather than have students write code and then run it to see if it works, the results of changes are displayed in the right pane immediately, providing immediate feedback. The lessons also include tips for solving common beginner problems.

Wired: Coders Get Instant Gratification With Khan Academy Programming

Previously:

Ending the Tyranny of the Lecture

Author Teaches Kids to Code Without Computers