Category Archives: education

HacketyHack from WhyTheLuckyStiff

Posted on April 26, 2007 | Leave a comment

No it’s not a tip for the 5.50 at Punchestown it’s the latest project from _why (a legend in the world of Ruby, if a language as young as Ruby can have legends). HacketyHack is a framework to teach kids how to program, built using Ruby and the gekco browser engine, it’s free and it’s an ideal next step when your kids get a bit bored with MIT’s Scratch. It’s not as much “fun” as Scratch but it will guide kids into the “real world” of programming and as the code is pure Ruby, the sky’s the limit. If fact if any “real programmers” out there have been meaning to learn some Ruby to see what all the fuss is about, HackeyHack is an excellent way to start.

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Posted in education, news, Ruby

Build your own Bebo

Posted on February 27, 2007 | Leave a comment

I see that Ning (co-founded by Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame) has settled on a revenue model. Ning allows anybody to create their own social network site (think Bebo, MySpace, if you don’t know what I’m talking about just grab any 17 year old and ask). The resulting networks can be either public or private, new members can be by invite of the original owner or as is more usual by invite of any member. For $4.95 (€3.80) per month you can associate your own domain with your network and for $19.95 (€15) per month you can remove ads or replace them with your own ad network. (Replacing the ads would be a priority for sites aimed at minors or at a conservative audience as the existing ads seem to tend towards the ‘get your naughty pictures here’ type!).

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 ……

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Posted in education, news, Web2.0

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Want your kids to have the programming itch, then Scratch it!

Posted on February 19, 2007 | 4 Comments

Having looked in the past for a suitable introduction to programming for my 10 year old son I had come to the conclusion that the existing options (such as KPL) where too ‘wordy’ and not able to compete with the point and click powered online/gaming worlds that youngsters now inhabit. That was until I discovered Scratch, an education oriented programming language developed by MIT.

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…

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/v/jxDw-t3XWd0]

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Posted in education, excel, programming, Ruby