Using Pygame with its similar problem domain to that of Scratch would, I figured, make the transition to a grown-up platform easier, and so it has; concepts such as sprite, coordinates, animation etc. are common to both.  I took him through the “Pummel the Chimp” tutorial, expecting his young eyes to glaze over within 10 minutes, but no, a hour later he was still engaged and learning.  Why? He already has a deep understanding of programming, particularly object oriented programming, all thanks to Scratch.

Most of this knowledge he acquired without any help for me, I simply introduced him to Scratch and explained one or two concepts (variables and messages/method calls) which he initially had trouble with, the rest he picked up from looking at other Scratch projects and from writing his own.

So if your kids (or even you) have an itch to learn the essence of programming in a fun and effective way, then Scratch it.

I’m using the free (up to six mind maps) version of MeidMeister but like other such services that require a monthly subscription for access to the unlimited premium edition I’m unlikely to bite. I’m afraid I’m spoiled by the free offerings of the likes of Google Apps and the pay-as-you-go offerings of Amazon Ec2/S3 so the idea of paying a fixed monthly charge for a ‘point-solution’ doesn’t appeal.

Perhaps their long term strategy is to be purchased by the likes of Google and indeed the product would fit in beautifully with existing Google Apps offerings right down to the wiki-like sharing facilities. Nevertheless, well worth checking out the free version and if sharing and collaborating of multiple mind maps is your thing (schools come to mind) then the €3.21 monthly charge is very reasonable. Or perhaps you could use their sponsoring facility to pay for a premium licence for your local school.

While reading Nick Carr’s post on the CapGemini’s partnership with Google to push Google Apps I recalled that another sign of Web2.0 adoption within the enterprise was Siemens use of Facebook as an intranet. To obtain a reference link I opened Google Reader and searched on “Facebook Siemens” as I figured I must have read it on a blog post. Up comes an entry in my del.icio.us account with a link to a Robert Scoble comment on a Techcrunch post. Google Reader Search included my del.icio.us account in the search because I’ve subscribed to its feed. (Before you ask, I subscribe to my own feed as a “second chance” reminder to re-read the stuff I’ve tagged as sometimes I only glance at articles to see if they are of interest, tag them if they appear to be and return when I have more time to fully digest them).

I now can search both my “knowledge stores” using the same interface. Admittedly my del.icio.us searches are restricted to meta data i.e. the tags/descriptions I’ve assigned to the link (and the link’s own heading text), but as I tend to over-egg the pudding when it comes to tags I can live with that restriction.

This opens up all sorts of easy to implement knowledge management (KM) scenarios for both individuals and organisations (previous attempts at corporate KM have been, to say the least, a disaster), possible examples:

• Students and teachers recording notes and lectures using Google Docs , which can then be subscribed to via RSS and subsequently searched using Google Reader Search.
• Same as above but using blog posts as the recording mechanism.
• Short notes and records (time sheets?) could be recorded using Twitter, again subscribed to via feeds and thus enabled for inclusion in a searchable knowledge store.

This type of knowledge sharing is not suitable for highly sensitive data but is ideal for community data and for non-sensitive/semi-private data (such as my del.icio.us bookmarks). Search enabled Google Reader may prove to be the killer app that RSS and KM have been waiting for.

More Douglas Crawford JavaScript/DOM related presentations can be found here.

The feature that impressed me most about JavaScript is its functional programming and closure support, a good introduction to the functional programming capabilities of JavaScript can be found here.

This service is ideal for internal school social networks or for local community sites or church groups or support groups or …, the list is endless. See Scoble for video demos of the service.

The DIY web is becoming a reality. There really is no going back ……

As an introduction to programing it is superb and it’s also fun. I could not drag my son away from it and not only that, within two days he had come in contact with (and understood) most of the important structures of any programming language, including loops, if-then-else statements, variables, encapsulation, events, messages (the tool is built in Smalltalk and it shows).

When he outgrows Scratch, he would then be capable of moving on to other more powerful education oriented languages such as Phrogram (the next version of KPL) or Squekland (built using another Smalltalk variation) or indeed a ‘real’ language such as Ruby.

I could have done with this 15 years or so ago when I was trying to get my head around OOP concepts (when I started coding, procedural languages such as Cobol, PL1, Fortran, MUMPS and various types of BASIC where the weapons of choice for commercial development).

I also think end-user focused language designers could also learn a lot from the design of the scratch IDE; perhaps if Microsoft were ever to retire the venerable VBA, they should replace it with a Scratch-like macro language?

Check out the video and definitely download it if you have kids in the house…