[Edu-sig] How do kids these days get started in programming?

[Maria Droujkova]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 12:02 PM, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 8:21 AM, Maria Droujkova <droujkova at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> << SNIP >>
>
>> That's why I am looking for kid-friendly AND large communities of
>> practice first and foremost for any educational endeavors...
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Cheers,
>> MariaD
>

Exclusivity should be an interesting angle to pursue, with that
"Hogwarts" metaphor. Still, math is already such an uphill battle
socially that going for even smaller communities, on top of small
interest in math, may be exponentially hard. Both approaches should be
tried, though.


>
> In any case, remember that teachers, not just students, like that
> feeling of being in a small pilot or government study, elite guinea
> pigs, something to brag about, kind of like TAG.  That's where I like
> talking about the Winterhaven Experiment (see slides) where Silicon
> Forest executives had total control of our "geek Hogwarts", were able
> to boot Google Earth the first day, go from there to Kml to Xml to GIS
> more generally, as a set of rich data structures on a polyhedron
> (planet Earth), ergo we're talking geography (GIS) not just geometry,
> etc.  Bridging geometry and geography is a fond goal of ours.

I just got back from a nice workshop about Math Circles and Math Clubs
(Twitter hashtag #greatcircles though almost nobody joined me in
reporting it on Twitter
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23greatcircles) - there was a very
nice presentation there by Tom Davis (a pdf on his page is related
http://www.geometer.org/mathcircles/) on geography and geometry.
Questions like, "Where do you need to stand on Venus for the sun to be
directly overhead?" Then I asked him about designing your own planet
systems, which can be a good programming task, I think >_>



-- 
Cheers,
MariaD

Make math your own, to make your own math.

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