How fun?
Check out the following videos. We’re going to eBay to load up on track today.
YouTube: Lieshout Duplo train track (part 2), the helix
YouTube: Just another Sunday afternoon
YouTube: Daniel’s Duplo Trains
YouTube: The duplosmasher – for you metal fans out there.
YouTube: The Information Train – for you CompSci fans out there.
Emma and me played around with Scratch the other day. It really does live up to its billing as a Lego-like environment to write programs in (especially where simple animations are concerned).
You might think that introducing a 3 year old to programming is a bit overboard – but this is just another set of Lego bricks.
Which is perfect.
Related links:
And this won’t surprise my friends – she tells them better than me!
“Why did the chicken cross the playground?
To get to the other slide!”
“Why is six afraid of seven?
Because seven ate nine!”
“Whats black and white and red all over?
The newspaper!”
Her timing is great.
Her knock knock jokes need some work, she lets you ask “who’s there” but answers the whole thing with someone’s name and a smile and laugh. Then again – that’s just awesome.
Psychology Today: The Art of Now: Six Steps to Living in the Moment
ScientificAmerican: The Serious Need for Play
defmacro: Taming Perfectionism
NYTimes Book Review: Reality Intrudes on an Undercover Mental Patient
Cognitive Daily: Would we still obey? The first replication of Milgram’s work in over 30 years
The Frontal Cortex :Kandel on Psychotherapy
NewScientist: Our world may be a giant hologram
Wired: Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge
YouTube: Son House – Preachin’ the Blues
YouTube: Son House – Levee Camp Blues
YouTube: Blind Willie McTell – “Boll Weevil”
IMEEM: Muddy Watters – I Be’s Troubled
YouTube: Billie Holiday – Strange Fruit
YouTube: Ma Rainey – Booze And Blues
YouTube: Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon – Will the Circle Be Unbroken
YouTube: Bessie Smith – You Gotta Gimmie Some
YouTube: Precious Lord Take My Hand, covered by Rain Boy!
YouTube: Go Tell It On A Mountain, covered by Peter , Paul & Mary
YouTube: Son House – Death Letter
Check out Apex Watson featuring Mr. Matthew Mah on guitar.
Recent conversations here and at work have reminded me I have stacks and stacks of old cassettes with me and friends jamming, writing songs, all of us living a bit raw, just over ten years old. I need to get them converted digitally right away, before their already bad fidelity gets worst.
Scott Westerman: If you will it, it is no dream:
I tell the people I serve to start from the premise that all things are possible. Work backwards from there. Charles Kettering’s wise counsel that “Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future,” was never more true.
Here’s hoping that more of my geek friends can develop that outlook.
Scholastic.com: Face to Face: Alan Kay Still Waiting for the Revolution:
Q: Well, what should 21st-century education be about?
A: The most critical thing about the 20th and 21st centuries is that there’s a bunch of new invented ideas–many of them connected with modern civilization–that our nervous systems are not at all set up to automatically understand. Equal rights, for example. Or calculus. You won’t find these ideas in ancient or traditional societies.If you take all the anthropological universals and lay them out, those are the things that you can expect children to learn from their environment–and they do. But the point of school is to teach all those things that are inventions and that are hard to learn because we’re not explicitly wired for them. Like reading and writing.
Virtually all learning difficulties that children face are caused by adults’ inability to set up reasonable environments for them. The biggest barrier to improving education for children, with or without computers, is the completely impoverished imaginations of most adults.
Followup link: Squeakland.org
And a little Flash to boot 🙂
Flash sounds like a perfect tool to teach programming. Others I’ve been reading about:
Scratch (scratch is built on Squeak Smalltalk – there are other educational environments/tools built with it as well)
My roots: LOGO and Commodore BASIC.
Interesting related article at O’Reilly: Why Johnny Can’t Program.