Linda Liukas' Programming book for Children has Huge First Day on Kickstarter
arcticstartup.com
arcticstartup.com
I don't know Linda but I volunteered at RailsGirls in SF this past weekend. It was a wonderful experience and I'm hoping to organize one here in my area. I've got 4 kids (3 girls, 1 boy) and we do everything from LEGOs to making movies to programming to SnapCircuits to building robots.
I'm excited about this book. Even if I wasn't, I honestly can't imagine anything bad/wrong coming out of its existence. It's good to know many of you can. A woman who already speaks and organizes events is writing and illustrating a children's book about programming–and some of you sit and criticize her motives, pedagogy, and presentation skills from your desks. Bravo.
I generally don't swear, but some of you are jackasses.
I'd say this is a perfect example of why there aren't more women in computers. From what I've seen, a lot of women have a low tolerance for this level of overt critique, regardless of whether the critique is correct or not.
There is nothing horrible about this project that warrants a negative view, particularly one that doesn't present any alternative.
Please stop talking.
A lot of women do. So do a lot of men. Computer science is filled with people on the poor side of "social skill set", and that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. That's why there are less women in the field - they simply aren't going to tolerate a default reaction that is insulting first and helpful only if you ignore the attitude.
Don't get me wrong, we turn off a lot of people - men and women - because of this, but we lose a lot more women, percentage wise.
And just a note: The irony of you telling me to "please stop talking" is, well, perfectly suited to the topic of our conversation.
It's not healthy to be permanently offended, but presenting an idea and being told that it isn't good (by someone presenting no alternative) or that you have ulterior motives (by readers of a website directed to startups of all things) isn't something someone should need to deal with.
I might be visualizing a different conversational domain than you are, but I'm not sure about this.
For example, when you build a bridge, there's a clear, objective line of quality somewhere above "the bridge stays standing." If I know enough about physics to see that your bridge won't stand, that doesn't mean that I also know enough about architecture to propose my own bridge -- but it doesn't have to; the knowledge that design X is fatally flawed is useful in its own right.
She isn't building a bridge, she's writing a story for children. The failure point is that nobody likes her story and therefore it doesn't sell. That's the absolute worst thing that can happen. Not a single child will be so critically scarred from her story that they never learn programming. Yet it may resonate for some.
There is no point to critique when the downside is so unbelievably inconsequential and the plus side is beneficial to a person, other than simply being an ass.
Women (overall of course, individuals vary) and men in general have different social cues and expectations. That's why each gender will act differently in the locker room than they will around the boardroom table.
Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with suggesting that women in general are less tolerant of being directly criticized in a public forum than men are. I don't view it as a sign of weakness. Men are much less tolerant of the behind the back insults that happen in women's circles than women are. The genders (overall, again) relate differently.
Neither is a sign of weakness, although they are exactly that when one of the two methods is dominant. And that's where we are today - computer science is closer to a locker room in culture and behaviour in many ways than it is to a boardroom. I see no reason not to accept the fact that many women would not be comfortable given that.
It isn't the women that need to change, though.
(I also see your point. My first comment may not have been properly clear.)
I thought this would be a worthwhile discussion to have as opposed to only useless "OMG this is the BEST thing ever" comments.
I'm sure that if Donald Knuth posted a "Show HN: I've been writing a book called The Art of Computer Programming", half of the comments would be negative (a fair lot of them would likely be about programming isn't an "art" and how it's preposterous to call it one). And so what? Again, I don't see this as a problem unless you hold HN to be some sort of ultimate source of information and discussion, which it is absolutely not.
But given how insufferably pompous SV culture can be at times ("Yeah we're changing the world with our totally rad app, and building the most amazing engineering team in the world"), I actually find it refreshing how comments on HN will try to pick anything apart and find whatever flaws it may have. It can be borderline ridiculous at times, but honestly so is everything else.
tl;dr if you're sick of HN, you're probably spending too much time on it
"Show HN" posts are specifically for criticism because (a) the OP asks for it and (b) we can actually put our eyes/ears/fingers on the product in question. This is a Kickstarter page for a product that hasn't even shipped yet. Instead of "I hope they cover loops", we get "she is odd in front of a camera" and "too many alarm bells".
And BTW, I'm all for picking apart "insufferably pompous SV culture"–in fact, I'd love to make some spoof startup videos doing exactly that. That's just not what I'm seeing here.
> I'm excited about this book. Even if I wasn't, I honestly can't imagine anything bad/wrong coming out of its existence.
So we should all make smiley faces and exclamation marks and ZOMG children will learn coding because "nothing bad can come out of its existence"?
> (a) the OP asks for it
Oh I'm sorry, I'll never criticise anything ever again if OP doesn't ask for it!
> (b) we can actually put our eyes/ears/fingers on the product in question.
Dude/Dudette, that is literally the Kickstarter model. Are you saying a page explaining things about the book, with a video is just there for fun? Maybe I should give every kickstarter some money because hey, nothing bad/wrong can come out of their existence and I'm not allowed to criticise it since I can't put my ears/fingers on the product in question.
> Instead of "I hope they cover loops", we get "she is odd in front of a camera" and "too many alarm bells".
It'll be a pretty boring Maths book if all they cover are integers, strings and variables.
And yes, she did look odd in front of the camera. And I'm allowed to say that in this comment. Because she created it and put it up on Kickstarter. You want universal acceptance and love? I got some bad news for you...
And btw, the video was actually bad. Sorry.
> And BTW, I'm all for picking apart "insufferably pompous SV culture"–in fact, I'd love to make some spoof startup videos doing exactly that. That's just not what I'm seeing here.
I see a lot of pompousness in this post too. Lets be reasonable. It's a freaking children's book. The author is a well established member of the development community and works for one of the most well known programming tutorial website. One can presume that they would have the time and money to start working on a book which has lots of drawings. People were writing books before Kickstarter existed you know.
But of course, how dare I criticise anything about those cute drawings. Think of the Children!
And honestly? I was't being a hater. I was apathetic towards this whole thing before reading the GP.
In any case, I got nothing against the project itself. If it succeeds (which is fairly evident at this point), good for the people involved.
Your way of "argumenting" is not doing you any favors.
If the (rather mild) contents of this thread are what you're hemming and hawing about, please make good on your threat, leave and take the horse you rode in on with you.
Don't blame women for this phenomenon (and I'm not saying you are); blame those men who view women as fragile children in need of protection.
To add insult to injury, you're being drama-royalty: just because a few nobodies level unfounded criticism at her is not reason to "quit HN for good". Or you would've quit long ago. And instead of rubbing their face in their dumbness by explaining to them how wrong their criticism is, you're just going to stand on a soapbox and complain in general about how annoying the world is. Do something about it! And no, what you have posted is not doing something about it.
You should certainly not do it within two hours after the article was posted, to allow time for selfcorrection. That is the point of the voting system.
There is also something wrong with doing it in an appeal-to-emotion fashion, threatening how this is 'almost making you leave'. You should clearly address the problem at hand, citing examples and explaining the problem, instead of hiding the actual problem that the fuss is about in the third paragraph.
Too little content, too much drama.
A top level comment seems to be the only appropriate place to discuss the overall tone or tenor of a conversation. Responding to each dismissive/negative/unconstructive comment seems redundant and annoying.
It's a diversion at best. If you feel someone is being unpleasant, deal with it. You needn't be pleasant to be right. If they're being unpleasant and wrong, reply with why they're wrong, or alternatively downvote and move on. No need for meta noise in any case.
I do, however, see a lot of useless, time-wasting, off topic tone arguments.
And yeah, I get the concern PG has about community fragmentation, but when I see a comment "leave HN" that has half a dozen replies under it, I really don't think I need to go down that thread of discussion any further.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
EDIT: wanted to also add I had no intention/foresight of "hijacking" the top spot. Most of my HN comments get lost in the ether–which I'm perfectly fine with.
edit: It's much shorter than 50 pages full of text -- but I think this project looks great, especially for the target audience. IMNHO there's a pretty thin line between children's books like this, and when those actually interested (and a little older, maybe) can get started with any old programming book (many of the Ruby and Python books should work fine -- if we could learn 68000 asm in a foreign language from a magazine at 12, surely most of the "proper" books should be within reach of a motivated 10 year old?). What's needed is some books and materials to make the field interesting and fun to get into.
Comments about comments are an all too common contribution to noise in the SNR of the internet (and my apologies for contributing thereto! An effort at future signal clarity).
To all: Please avoid posting comments critical of critical comments, which in turn attract critical comments - down that road lies madness (and stack overflows).
My youngest child could count to 10 at 18 months most likely because she insists on me reading the infernal book "Deborah the Dozy Duckling" all the time. It's about a duck that falls asleep while playing hide and seek. The whole book is frankly awful and I hate reading it, but that one page where Deborah's friends count to 10 turned out to grab her for some reason. Books can be very, very powerful learning devices.
I had a 1991-issued book called “Professor Fortran's Encyclopaedia“ in my childhood. It introduced me to computers, modems, viruses and even several BASIC commands in the form of a comic book with funny characters:
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Энциклопедия_профессора_Фортран...
I did not learn programming from it (it contained no actual code other than a “hello world”), but it fired up my imagination and introduced me to computery things. I didn't get to have an actual computer until five years later, but when I finally got it, I got into programming immediately.
This kind of books is extremely underrepresented and I believe very valuable.
I agree - the Usborne computer books made a huge impression on me as a youngster. I'm all for Hello Ruby.
Here are the scans:
http://trinixy.ru/9306-jenciklopedija_professora_fortrana_25...
I have always thought it was a wonderfully delightful way to introduce children to those sort of concepts. It was more EE/CE than coding (and the rest of the book was heavily ME), but I think the approach adapts to coding equally well.
(http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Way-Things-Work/dp/0395938473)
Of course stories matter. My self image as a proto nerd was largely informed by culture. War Games, Short Circuit, a bazillion scifi stories, popular science mags and books, etc. I may have learned coding from K&R. But I was motivated to learn how by the examples and role models I saw.
Liukas's talk at Heroku Waza 2013 (further down the kickstarter page) explains her philosophy and motivation for the book. Having personally spent real effort on messaging, narratives, innovation, and motivating people -- I think her strategy is brilliant.
This type of literacy would be something akin to "computational thinking" and then programming is to computational thinking as arithmetic is to mathematics. Programming shouldn't be an end in itself but a means to develop a deeper understanding of our modern information-rich technological sophisticated society. And yes, in my opinion, in that society one should be able to "program" as much as one should be able to "do arithmetic" or "can read/write". "Programming" can mean a lot of different things to different groups of people, but the basic idea of information processing and automatic repetitive tasks should be understood by all.
Shoot, I remember back in the 90's when I was still in high school, the programming books I had were so dry that it almost made me want to quit for good (I did take a 10 year break from learning to code and went into real estate investing).
Anyone that tells you to learn programming the hard way is full of it. Making programming fun and interesting definitely lowers the entry barrier. Maybe that's why some of the folks feel insecure that some youngin' may learn coding and steal away their job? You just never know!
When we started Rails Girls with Linda, we saw that there were plenty of programming workshops, books and education available. We didn't want to create one more. Instead we focused on creating easy, one-day workshop to get you to try and see what programming and technology is about, while also building your first sample application and getting meet the local tech scene. After the workshop we tell the people that you now have all the tools and contacts you need for programming or creating something. It's up to you to learn more.
The important part was that all these people (probably thousands at this point) got over the first step and of whom many wouldn't have touched programming otherwise.
In the same way I don't think this book should be about teaching programming that much, but more as creating stories and personalities for technologies to peak interest. Children's interest usually leads to questions and to more interest. You can then use that energy, answer the questions, teach more and extend the workbook exercises to more challenging things. You can also use those characters as a basis to explaining the technology world or talking about what you do for living.
The point is that when you're trying to get a new demographic interested, you need to find a way to get them over the first step, which is to get them involved and getting them interested. The earlier this happens, the better.
Why project like this and the Goldie Box are important, is that they create a story, a world and excitement around technology, for those who might miss or haven't found their innate interest yet.
It seems a lot of "problem solvers" in this thread couldn't quite imagine the problem you might be addressing, let alone the possibilities of the solution you chose.
Edit: Looks really promising btw. Best of luck moving forward.
(Just clarification that I'm not involved with this project but I have talked about it with Linda in the past. So my views are my own views, and not necessarily Linda's.)
I say all this for two thing:
- I think is brilliant that there are books specifically teaching basic programming to kids, so more of them is great news
- Making a good programming book at that age is challenging, so please let it be good
This is, IMHO, an entry point, to give a taste of what programming is, so kids can try themselves later in front of a computer. Not sure what the best approach is, and I'm not convinced about the "story" approach, as I am not sure if it's interactive enough (as showing exercises). But, hey, there should be some options, and giving Linda's experience, I guess she has a better knowledge about teaching than me. So I'm sure it will be great
So, kudos to Linda... ;-)
[1] http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3384/5718165821_2ce65d26fd_z.j...
[2] http://www.paraquenoseolviden.com/gallery2/v/electronica/pro...
- I suspect that this compartmentalized targeting (esp. to younger demographics) really should be explored with other projects...
...Arduino, BSD/Linux/*nix, Py, JS, and so forth.
My kids have an old 8-bit machine .. and they love the thing. They can type in their own BASIC programs from tons of sources, or load up a hundred games and other educational apps from a disk that I know won't contain anything weird or offensive .. on a machine with no access to the Internet. Its a wonderful thing, hearing a 6-year old tell his 4 year old brother how to make a sound eminate with just a few SOUND and PLAY commands ..
If they already like Minecraft, they'll probably have a blast with it, and learn programming at the same time.
My kids complained about 'not having enough dots on the display' and "why are there no good games on it - like Super Mario", but once I showed them a few of the classics (Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy), they got right into it.
Most important of all, however: play with the machine with your kids, too. This is a great way to get them interested - you do the typing, they do the reading. ;)
Good luck!
http://www.stuffaboutcode.com/2013/04/minecraft-pi-edition-a...
He set up an "honor system" store where people were expected to asynchronously trade (by dropping) some commodity for some other commodity and got upset at people "stealing".
Either this generation of kids will be the best citizens the world has ever seen, or the worst.
Both. Exactly as every past generation.
Remember, "The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work."
Example: me. I had access to a computer, but couldn't comprehend the (foreign) lingo well enough to find the correct books in the (vast) library. My parents weren't into technology and couldn't help me. Had they understood the potential and had they given a few nudges, I would have started at 8 what I now started at 20. Many kids need guidance and encouragement.
> The book will be hardcover, 8x8 inches and 32 pages. The activity book is 16 pages and paperback.
I don't see how you could cover even just the basics mentioned on the Kickstarter page in so few pages without going too fast (remember this is a picture book). Maybe turning it into a series with different adventures (topics) makes more sense?
But this is just what I remembered from reading her Kickstarter!
How is it possible to teach even the basics of programming in 32 pages?
How would you explain a simple FOR loop to a child through a story?
"What's wrong?" quizzed Ivy Iterator.
"It's too complicated" moaned George, he continued: "Mr Main has asked me to deliver all of these invites to the birthday party but I keep forgetting which people I've given invitations to. I gave Sam three invites and Polly hasn't got one yet, it's no use! I can't remember which invite is which!"
"Don't worry" said Ivy, "lets work together to make this more simple! I'll remember which invitation we're giving and which one is next, so all you have to do is deliver the invite!"
George beamed, "Really? You can do that for me?"
"Sure thing George! They don't call me Ivy Iterator for nothing!"
(that's cryptic internet speak for, man I really like what you wrote, I can totally imagine the next chapter being about George asking Ivy how she did that!)
Sign me up to buy two copies when you do your kickstarter.
It's a child. I'd hope you'd explain map instead.
You wouldn't.
The same way you don't explain how to take a corner kick to a child playing soccer. All you need to do is explain that they need to kick the ball into the net, and let them go.
The same way you don't teach multiplication to a child before you teach the concepts of grouping and sorting.
Everything else comes later. This is a good introduction, not something that will qualify them to work in the industry.
Giving them the ball and letting them run is not coaching. It works for the 1st 5 minutes; then they'd probably like to have some success or learn something. Kids are like that.
Ergo, playing a game is the best way for a 6 year old to learn. At this age, exposure is the key element.
"Hello Ruby will be a classic journey of discovery that teaches the readers about different people working together, how problems can be solved in small sequences and how remixing and sharing helps everyone."
"The activity book teaches kids early programming skills. It’s designed to be enjoyed by a kid alone, but can also be worked through with an adult. And best of all - the workbook is designed to be doodled, wrecked and drawn all over.
- The foundational knowledge structures, like sequences, variables, patterns, loops, lists, conditionals, operators and events. Taught through exercises of dot-to-dot, pairs, odd-one-out, all from Ruby's world.
- A sprinkle of software culture, by teaching them to abstract and modularise, work iteratively and incrementally as well as encouraging them to reuse and remix work.
- Creativity and DIY attitude. Tons of doodles, logic puzzles and even a foldable miniature laptop that allows the kid to peek inside a computer."
Even if it just inculcates problem solving techniques like breaking a problem down into its component parts and then grokking the real underlying problem rather than the symptoms, (the lack of the latter is quite prevalent these days), it will be a net gain.
She's certainly very good at marketing
You're certainly very good at suggesting your criticism should be taken seriously, because you preceded it with praise.
I think you're over-thinking it.
Everything that can go in other direction related to stereotypes and gender roles - DID. It went so overboard that I think it's a part of marketing strategy for it. This is just sad, because I think the product could've done without it as well as it did.
She was being playful. As a former kid, I appreciate that.
If it was a Kickstarter for an invention or a software product, I'd expect the presenters to be a bit more sedate. But given what she's selling, I think showcasing her personality helped make it clear that she's the right person for this job.
Again, if people like it, and kids like it, fine. I just wanted to comment because I think it would be sad if everything for kids would be converted into that kind of format.
Actually the whole premise of "getting kids interested" already points to a problem. Kids are naturally interested. You don't have to go into manic mode to get them interested.
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aprog...
Or maybe because men can't draw as well as women?
Edit: probably I'll get downvoted for this so I'll just add that I think it's good this book is being made. Can't hurt to try different things to get kids interested. Just not sure why the gender comment was necessary.
I said nothing about gender nor did I intend to, that was your assumption.
Rather affirm that this is exactly part of what you were saying [1]. I'll one-up you: indeed, the chance of a male writing such a book is much smaller than the chance of a female writing such a book. Acting as if gender wouldn't influence choice of content and style is ridiculous.
And before anyone jumps on my back: I'm telling it like it is, which implies nothing about how I think that it should be.
[1] Why would 'diversity' be a good thing, if not for the fact that it results in, you know, more diversity? Differences in the input result in differences in the output.
So what aspects of it are female specific? Because women would be more likely to worry about educating children?
Seriously, answer the question instead of relying on prejudice, please.
I'd consent that female heroines might be more likely for female authors (didn't check, though), although in this case I suspect gender of author's children might be more important.
Edit: I have to go further - sorry, but you made me think about it. Of course the odds of a woman writing such a book are significantly smaller, simply because there are much fewer female programmers than male programmers.
Of course the odds of a woman writing such a book are
significantly smaller, simply because there are much fewer
female programmers than male programmers.
Which implies I assume P(female programmer writing such a book) / P(male programmer writing such a book) > P(male programmer writing book) / P(female programmer writing book). Also P(female programmer writing such a book|female programmer writing book) > P(male programmer writing such a book|male programmer writing book)
So what aspects of it are female specific?
What a bigoted comment. OP is praising diversity, and you are suggesting what, exactly? That there isn't an issue if everyone in a field approaches a problem in the exact same way? Are you really that small minded?
Your comment also sounds as if you think women would approach the issue in a completely different way than men, so please explain in which way?
Maybe men would be less likely to use a female protagonist, I haven't sampled the books content. Maybe not. So it's maybe nice to have a programming book with a female protagonist, but I doubt it is something only women would think of.
In fact I suppose if a man who has a daughter were to write such a book, he would be quite likely to make the protagonist female, too.
Btw. the Python books for kids looks as if there are also stories in it, and I saw at least one rave review from an 8 year old: http://www.amazon.com/Python-Kids-Playful-Introduction-Progr...
Maybe Alice in Wonderland would work, too?
The reasoning is simple: Alan Kay and others have repeatedly demonstrated kids have a far greater aptitude for this stuff than is generally accepted. The packaging in this manner isn't the problem, the problem is the programming environments around today don't tend to do anything the kids are interested in without overcoming significant hurdles. i.e. unless you can do graphics easily forget it.
Back when I grew up in the 80s every 8 year old had to do Logo at school, partly to teach maths, partly to teach programming constructs. This was the part of the week almost everyone liked most. Make pictures, do maths, play with robots - what's not to love?
So, hope that theory is wrong, but it sets off too many alarms for now.
breaking down one big problem to smaller problems sequencing beyond 1, 2, 3 but in problem solving logical thinking / prediction
Kids have different tastes, like everyone. So why not an illustrated guide? It does not necessarily "fix" a problem, but provide a wider range of material. Not everything has to be code.
Linda has credibility when it comes to teaching code, so I would not put myself above that.
I'd take more issue with the obvious branding. It would have been more elegant if the penguin and robot had more generic renderings.
The art here is in finding the set of virtual objects needed for the desired result, ideally about which there is some existing intuition for reasoning about. In Mindstorms they have a good term for this that I've forgotten, of which the turtle is the object used to teach ideas of geometry, subroutines etc.
She founded Rails Girls in 2010 and joined Code Academy a few years ago so she has way more experience introducing people to programming than she does on doing illustrations.
I believe getting people inspired is the best way to get them to learn. My two cents is that she was inspired by _why's work and tries take that approach further.
Yes. The the alarms bells are far too numerous when the co-founder of Rails Girls ("Our aim is to give tools and a community for women to understand technology and to build their ideas."), and community manager at Codeacademy expands her mission of education and inspiration to children via a book tailored to them.
Alarm bells everywhere.
Thankfully, you've caught the issues and rang the (many) alarms before the book has even been written. Very efficient.
Most 8 year olds are looking at logo (or whatever) and being turned off from it.
Looks like an effort to promote an illustrator more [..]
The irony of this video is he's in danger of being referenced here in the same way he references Engelbart and Sutherland.
The fact that so much of our modern computing environment stems from the work of a molecular biologist trying to teach children to program is lost on many. He's truly a visionary, sometimes wrong, but always at least interesting.
EDIT: Haven't been able to find a proper clip of it, but the really relevant part to this is that back in the 70s at PARC they used to teach Smalltalk to kids, and the apps they'd produce were seriously non-trivial. Things like electronics schematics editors (you can see part of this in passing during the OOPSLA video) were implemented by children. This still blows my mind.
For the game, it was "for kids" (he meant his younger sister), it was a BORED game, and did he mention it wasn't for little kids?
I am curious as to the format, book or board game, being relevant in this day
Kids abilities and interests differ quite significantly between 3 and 5, 5 and 7, and certainly between 5-7 and 10. (I didn't realise how much until I watched these two growing up.)
Her illustrations are really great.
Whether the book is effective at teaching Ruby to kids remains to be seen, but I'm pulling for her.
Who else sees it?
Was looking for exactly such a book for teaching my 7 and 8 year old brothers the theoretical basics of programming after getting them to create their own tiny games with MIT's Scratch.
As I'm also quite confident that Linda's execution will be of highest quality, I pre-ordered the digital version.
Not only do young women win (obvious), but young men do as well as they are less likely to both accept and perpetuate stereotypes.
It was a bit muddled, but that is how I read his argument.
I wasn't arguing anything, merely clarifying the point of that poster.
But since you brought it up, the argument that boys benefit from being exposed to values like acceptance of diversity, and stand to gain by not being exposed to gender prejudice as they learn about the world around them...well it is an argument I not only accept, but embrace.
What a cynical and devious re-framing of the poster's argument btw. Aren't you something.
Your use of quoting and italicised text makes you look so much more intelligent than me.
Btw, I wasn't reframing the poster's comment. That's what I was agreeing with, but I bet you couldn't see from behind all the red.
>I agree with the sentiment here, but please don't argue that boys benefit from this by having the chance to be obedient little utilities. but please don't argue that boys benefit from this by having the chance to be obedient little utilities.
That boys benefit is precisely the argument the poster is making (your framing them as "obedient little utilities" notwithstanding).
Additionally, the usage of italics simply indicates emphasis. It's one of the most mundane aspects of written English. Nothing fancy about it, FYI.
(I have nothing against a programming book written by woman - I learned Java from the Java Tutorial and earned lots of money with it - but I ask people to challenge their prejudices).
I even sent the author of the Java Tutorial a fan email once (the original author was a woman, don't know what it's current state is).
Backed.
That robot-parent programming in the gym blog post was one of the more inspiring posts I read in the last couple of years.
I think these are awesome too http://kidscodecamp.com/
- It is hard to get Ruby running on non-Linux systems.
- Ruby programs are incredibly hard to understand because the Ruby language is not compact [2]
- Rails is such a big part of the Ruby community, it is hard to find Ruby programs that aren't Rails webapps. So anyone who becomes interested in Ruby from the book, and searches online for more resources, will probably mostly get Rails-related hits.
- These hits will not just be useless to a beginner, but intimidating and misleading. Web application programming is a poor area to direct beginners into, because even the most trivial web application requires understanding a dizzying array of complicated, interconnected ideas such networking, HTTP, URL's, databases, template processing, HTML, browsers...
[1] I'm not trying to cast aspersions on anyone who started programming in these languages, and I'm not saying it's impossible to start there even today. I'm just saying that today there are much better choices available, such as Python.
I don't quite understand why kids need to be taught to want to build things. Most kids already want to build things. They just need an easy interface to accomplish a task and incrementally improve their creation.
Before legos, did we need a kid book about masonry? Of course not, we just needed an easy and approachable type of block.
I'm not meaning to sound so negative. It's a good project with a worthy cause. But, it's value is in the fact that parents want to impart their interests on to their kids and will spend money on artsy little books. So, I'm just questioning whether this is the right product to accomplish the stated cause.
I'm reminded of this quote by Neil Degrasse Tyson in one of his speeches: "Stop worrying about the kids! They're fine, they're already interested in Space. It's the grown ups I'm worried about."
That said, I'm not sure if I'd be comfortable giving this particular book to a young child. From the sketches it seems as if it will be light on fundamentals like logic and data structures, and a bit heavy on Ruby-specific abstractions and borderline political value judgements. I don't want to tell the younger generation which application stack they should be using, to say nothing of the completely out of place "Apple is selfish, Python is fascist" storyboards.
If you're interested in honest advice I'd remove the parts about what is wrong with all the other technologies and substitute material related to the history and engineering that made all of these tools possible. Mention how strings and floats are encoded as bits, for example. Young children are not going to be wondering why they are learning Ruby instead of C or assembly, but they will be wondering how it does all that cool stuff.
That's why she needs a kickstarter.
It's a marketing tool, possibly moreso than it's a crowdfunding tool.
But besides that, I think this has the potential to be great... but I honestly didn't get much from the video about the content of the book. It's a story, and it's about Ruby. How? What does it teach? How does it encourage kids to interact with technology, or program computers, or whatever the goal is? All I saw were a bunch of pretty pictures and a promise that kids will learn something.
It is sad that both sides of the gender gap here have decided to make this book about gender. No one made this article out about people and they great things we can accomplish. I'm disappointed.
That or stop treating kids like kids, give them some standard and classic books, bootstrap an environment and let them dive in.
_why's (poignant) guide is awesome and entertaining... but I'm not learning programming from it.
I'd also remind people about HN user aristus' Lauren Ipsum book (http://www.laurenipsum.org/) for kids. Every one you buy he donates one to schools, etc.
Overall, I think the book idea is for a good cause, regardless of the author.
I also think this comic was very good too for learning ruby. too bad the author disappeared mysteriously.
http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/chapter-1.htm...
www.reddit.com
Oh, and I bet you're on Reddit too, just like most people here.
The book is aimed at girls. It would be nice to think that children were not conditioned by gender stereotypes at the age of 6/7, but unfortunately they are.
I'm going to believe the author when she says that this is for children. I just don't buy the idea that boys can't enjoy stories with female leads. Look at Brave or The Hunger Games. My son loves those.