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E-skills4Future - ICT resources & inspiration!
Computer programming has been one of my passions since I was a 11 years old. I'll never forget how excited I was when my parents bought me my first ColecoVision computer! At that time, computers were primarily tape driven. The one I owned operated on two cassette tapes which needed one for storage and the other for the OS. Flipping through operator's manual, I discovered that my new computer was fully programmable! I'll never forget how excited I was when I saw my first program in action! That's all it took to get me hooked! I knew this is what I wanted to spend my life doing it. By Isaac Ortiz Read more: http://www.squidoo.com/learn-computer-programming
As a primer, Mozilla recently debuted its Webmaker program in hopes of making it “easy for anyone to make something amazing on the web, learning skills as they go.” Webmaker Badges fit seamlessly with that purpose, throwing gamification and bragging rights into the mix. Admittedly, at first look these badges feel like a novelty more than anything else, but Mozilla has an interesting plan: to integrate them into Persona identities (which we covered here). With it, Mozilla hopes that these badges will provide a “lasting record” of a user’s capabilities and achievements, so they can show off “their new skills to teachers, classmates, peers or future colleges and employers.” That’s an ambitious goal.
Via DML Competition, Jenny Smith
A report commissioned by digital champion Martha Lane Fox finds 16 million people in the UK lack basic online skills such as using a search engine, sending and receiving emails, completing online applications and accessing information online. "We need to make the country fit for purpose through the next decade and ensure everyone and every organisation has basic digital literacy," said Ms Lane Fox.
Computer programming seemed like alphabet soup to Keautishay Young when she was a freshman. But after four years at Chicago Tech Academy, she can rattle off half a dozen programming languages she’s comfortable working in. At the charter school on the southwest side, teens aren’t just using computers to browse Facebook. They’re learning to build their own websites and smartphone apps. By Tricia Bobeda
Quick to grow its user base and revenues, last month Treehouse decided to give back to its community by doling out $3 million-worth of free tech education to 2,500 college students.
The scholarship received so much that it had to turn students away.
HTML5 is the thing to talk about these day. Today, we have a collection of some ridiculously impressive HTML5 canvas-based experiments that will make you say, “Wow!” Let’s take a peek at some of the latest, cutting edge examples out there. By Abhin Sharma Katia: remember to click on the links. Some of these experiments are really amazing.
Greg Linden is a veteran software engineer and startup entrepreneur in Seattle who developed Amazon.com’s recommendation engine, started the personalized news website Findory.com and worked for Microsoft’s Live Labs, among other tech ventures and companies. He’s also a parent who wants to make sure his kids learn a little about computer programming languages. But when he initially looked around for something helpful online, all he could find “was either tutorials designed for adults that overwhelm younger learners with their boring syntax and complexity, or games that didn’t teach an actual, valuable programming language.” By Todd Bishop
Via Digital Maverick
For me it all started in the year of 2006. I made an account on hi5.com, a social network that was popular back then. Hi5 let you customize your profile with the use of HTML and CSS. I started by googling “HTML Tutorials” and “CSS Tutorials” and began to snoop around the web for any type of useful info about web coding. The first site I looked in to was www.w3schools.com which I eventually found out it’s probably one the worst places to learn about web coding. Regardless of that though the lessons on w3schools gave me a very basic grasp of how HTML & CSS works which helped me grow from there on my own or with the help of more advanced tutorials. By Nick Panayotakos Full post: http://imcaptain.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/lets-talk-about-web-design/
One of the things that can smooth your passage into college is learning a new language. In California, high-schoolers tend to favor Spanish and on the east coast it is Chinese. But languages that help you get work and go up the ladder are not spoken. They go by names like Python, Rails or JavaScript – the languages of computer coding. They are slowly gaining much importance. Popular among these languages are – you guessed it! – the ones that help web construction and iPhone apps. Those who opt for these say they’re investing in a future where the Internet will be the bedrock for education, entertainment and everything else. And all of us would love to come up with a killer app, right? As one writer put it, knowing how the digital pieces fit together will be crucial to ensuring you’re not left in the dark ages. Full article: http://blog.classof1.com/learning-to-code-a-necessity-of-the-future/
Enthusiasm for learning programming languages is on the rise. And coding is no longer the domain of self-taught savants or formal C.S. students. Students of all ages and disciplines are recognizing the benefits of being more code fluent. Plenty of free, in-browser online tutorials have risen to meet this need. Infographic by OnlineCollege.org
Online Python Tutor is a free educational tool that helps students overcome a fundamental barrier to learning programming: understanding what happens as the computer executes each line of a program's source code. Using this tool, a teacher or student can write a Python program directly in the web browser and visualize what the computer is doing step-by-step as it executes the program.
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"Learning to code has been trendy for a while. There are numerous free resources on the internet for those who want to teach themselves to programme apps, robots etc. But why is everyone trying to convince us to learn how to code? Well, the reason is simple..."
Mozilla has partnered with charities Nesta and Nominet Trust to launch a programme that will aim to promote digital skills among children across the UK. The £225,000 Digital Makers fund and network will bring together organisations to support projects that target digital literacy for 4- to18-year-olds, the foundationhas announced. The initiative comes on the back of a YouGov study commissioned by Mozilla that found that most British children want to learn how to code. Three-fourths of children online in the UK between the ages of 8 and 15 are ‘very or fairly’ interested in learning how to build websites, games, or mobile apps. Meanwhile, 67 per cent of them professed an interest in learning programming. Of those children, three per cent said they already know how. by Rawiya Kameir Read more: http://www.itproportal.com/2012/11/08/mozilla-partners-with-uk-charities-to-promote-digital-literacy-for-children/
It’s no surprise that working in the game industry might look like a dream job to many people. I mean, who wouldn’t like games? Games are fun and a seemingly infinite source of entertainment. But what is it like to work in the game industry?
All this is to say that I speak with a lot of technology-minded people. As someone with a background in journalism, I’m well acquainted with the process of digesting new information quickly and so I’m usually able to get a better-than-passing grade in communicating with these people and understanding the basics of what they’re talking about. As a content marketer here, I have to thoroughly understand the details of a client’s technology to ensure their content, whether a blog post, tweet, SlideShare presentation or whitepaper, captures all the important details about what they do and communicates those details effectively to their target audience. But, at my core, I’m a communicator with a deep interest in technology, not a technology person with communication skills. I can scrounge up all the information necessary to answer the what, when, why and where of a company and its products. But my weakness is the how. By Alexandra Reid
Deep into the digital age, the need for everyone to understand and learn programming is becoming more and more apparent. Codecademy, Coursera and other education start-ups are stepping in to fill the much-needed gap to teach adults to code. For kids, non-profits like CodeNow are raising funds to run summer programming camps for minority high school students, while other organizations like Girls Who Code are working on getting middle and high school girls interested in computer science. By Sheena Vaidyanathan
Just the attempt to try to learn JavaScript, as Codeacademy starts students out with, is a useful and eye-opening exercise, no matter what you do in life. Everywhere I turn, there seems to be a new way to learn how to program online. There are free resources like Codeacademy, Udacity, Coursera, Mozilla’s P2PU, Google Code University, and MIT Open Courseware. There are also more and more high-quality paid resources, both online and off, like General Assembly, Treehouse or Bloc, not to mention local continuing ed classes across the spectrum of relevance and quality. But first, let’s address the question head on, why should non-programmers consider learning to code? By Anthony Wing Kosner Read full article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/10/06/learn-to-code-1-does-everybody-really-need-to-program/
Codecademy, Startuplandia's favorite online coding teacher, has just added Ruby to its library of courses. “Ruby is one of our most requested languages, and we’re psyched to finally be able to offer it to our users,” said Codecademyco-founder Zach Sims in an email conversation with VentureBeat this morning. Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/04/codecademy-ruby/#q0UCwiygjUOZ0Fey.99
For more than 2 years I have been intrigued by the tee I got from WordCamp Indonesia 2010. It has a line on its back, "Code is poetry."
On many websites I found, "Coders write."
Why do coders claim that they write when they, in fact, code? Coding is not writing, is it? I threw this question on Twitter. My friends, mostly web developers and game programmers, immediately replied. Read the full post here: http://dianaraquest.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/is-code-really-poetry/
With an increasing array of platforms & resolutions, it's time to embrace the creative capabilities of HTML and make development part of the design process... While I’ve spent most of my days in the creative department, I actually started my career as a developer. I was 16, and having discovered the WYSIWYG editor in Netscape Navigator Gold, I had taught myself the basics of HTML. I was inexperienced and couldn’t build much, but I did manage to make something that landed me a job building websites. I enjoyed those days working with code, but at night I found myself playing with Photoshop. Design seemed to come more naturally and I eventually moved into the creative department as a Graphic Designer. By Jeremy Bell Full blog post: http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/designing-with-code/
In this video Adria Richards explains why everyone should learn to code.
It's already ahead in getting public services online, now tiny Estonia is launching a nationwide scheme to teach school kids to write programs. Estonia, a small country with a population of 1.3 million people, punches above its own weight when it comes to advancements in tech. It was the birthplace of Skype, one of the first countries to have a government that was fully e-enabled, and now it has launched a nationwide scheme to teach school kids from the age of seven to 19, how to write code. The idea isn’t to start churning out app developers of the future, but people who have smarter relationships with technology, computers and the Web . So why start so early? “We want to change thinking that computers and programs are just things as they are. There is an opportunity to create something, and be a smart user of technology.” says Ave Lauringson, the coordinator of the project. By Parmy Olson Full article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2012/09/06/why-estonia-has-started-teaching-its-first-graders-to-code/
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Estonia, a small country with a population of 1.3 million people, punches above its own weight when it comes to advancements in tech.