Monday, August 19, 2013

Kid Programmers (in Kindergarten)
This may not seem to have anything to do with kindergarten at this point but just go with it for now. Right click anywhere on the screen and go down to inspect element. Click and a seemingly (to me, anyway) foreign language will appear. When you are ready just click the x to return to where you were. This among other things is just one more small indication of how computers have really changed since the days of Trash 80s and CoCo (Tandy color computers) that you hooked up to your TV. I have very vague memories of writing a few batches of MSDOS that made things appear on my screen but as with microwaves and cell phones, the inner workings didn't matter as much as the convenience and usefulness of the devices and all thoughts of “code writing” was left to others, brackets, semicolons, stuff from the top of the keyboard, and all.
Now I've read that kids as young as 3 and 4 years of age today are learning to program computers using new graphics-based coding languages, like Blocky or Scratch and ScratchJr. The idea behind this is that using these helps kids learn to organize and sequence their thoughts to give the computer commands and develop their own programs. The skills they learn and use programming computers (actually creating their own bits of software) blend over to other thinking areas like math and science and even writing. Additionally, these kids and kids of the future (which seems closer everyday) need to be smarter about how their computers work so they can “assimilate” data more easily and fix routine (and I'm talking subroutines that tell the computer what to do) problems. Maybe, Star Trek's Next Generation Borg were correct and we are all going to be “assimilated” in the future.

Dang! Might be time to beam me up, Skippy!

1 comment:

  1. Obviously, they're continuing mission is to create new files and seek out new data assimilations; to boldly go where no computer programmer has gone before....

    ReplyDelete

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