James shares his experience of teaching a class of 9 and 10 year old children how to code, and offers some advice:
- Don’t dumb it down
- Use real-world examples
- Make it hands on
- Set clear expectations
- Award certificates and/or stickers
As members of the web community we have a responsibility to share what we have learned. I can’t think of a better way of doing that then helping kids get started.
Hear, hear!
Declan from MakerClub came by the office week and told us all about this great initiative for kids in Brighton that we’re supporting through the BrightSparks programme.
Alan Kay’s initial description of a “Dynabook” written at Xerox PARC in 1972.
A write-up of the BrightSparks programme that Clearleft is taking part in.
Each company agreed to help support one local child from a low-income family, on free school meals or with a yearly household income of under £25k.
Ten years on from Afonso Cuarón’s masterpiece.
This is so great! Charlotte takes two previous ideas she’s been writing about (quantity queries and flexbox) and puts them together in a new way.
It took me a while to get around what the nth-child selectors are doing here, but Charlotte does such great job of explaining the CSS that even I could understand it.
Here’s the really clever technique that Charlotte used on the speakers page for this year’s UX London site.
I remember that Jon was really impressed that she managed to implement his crazy design.
This is rather lovely: explore a network of nodes, each of which contains the audio of a child describing a dream.
Inspired by the concept of an 8th continent to which all children belong, RadioEight is an interactive soundscape dedicated to the hidden world of dreams.
I think I’ve shown great restraint in not linking to loads of think-pieces about Star Wars and The Force Awakens, because believe me, I’ve been reading—and listening to—a lot.
What Jessica has written here is about The Force Awakens. But more than that, it’s about Star Wars. But more than that, it’s about childhood. But more than that…
What I’m saying is: if you only read one thing about the new Star Wars film, read this.
Another take on the kind of quantity queries that Charlotte has been experimenting with for a while now. It all goes back to the nth-child stuff that Heydon was talking about at Responsive Day Out
Just when I think that I don’t get the point of Medium, along comes Dan to show me the light. This thought-provoking thinkpiece isn’t quite on the same level of his seminal groundbreaking kittens work, but I guarantee it will stay with you.
Sounds like a good exercise for explaining just about anything. Smart.
A tool for getting instant visual feedback on your nth-child selectors. Considering that the way I figure out nth-child selectors is to try randomly changing numbers until it works, this should be quite useful for me.
This was my favourite moment from the Handheld conference in Cardiff.
This is a really well-written and worrying piece that pokes at that oft-cited truism about kids today being “digital natives”:
The parents seem to have some vague concept that spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.
The causes of this lack of digital literacy can be traced back to school:
We’ve mirrored corporate networks, preventing kids and teachers access to system settings, the command line and requiring admin rights to do almost anything. They’re sitting at a general purpose computer without the ability to do any general purpose computing.
Also, this article has the best “TL;DR” description ever.
Josh has been teaching HTML and CSS schoolkids. I love the pages that they’ve made. I really mean it. I genuinely think these are wonderful!
A great short talk from Clare about Code Club.
And this is why Code Club is such a great initiative.
This wouldn’t be appropriate for every site but I still think it could be a damned fine use of otherwise-neglected 404 pages: including information about missing children.
3D printing an exoskeleton for a child with arthrogryposis — technology can be so fricking awesome!