brianclements

Children ages 3-7 are really just beginning to learn how to think abstractly, which is a pretty core competency for programming. So when you say you want to teach fundamentals of coding, you really aren't even at "coding" yet. You're really at the fundamentals of math, language, reasoning, and problem solving and curious mindsets.

So what are the fundamentals of coding that 3-7 year olds can actually do?

1) Math - I would scour the web for all the different ways you can do basic math with any type of physical object (pencils, fruit, whatever). You may think it's too simple, but if you take a cognitive approach to this, practice must be done at some point with mapping a number of any object to it's linguistic representation in one's mind. Practice counting up/down, sorting stuff into groups and sets, quantity, patterns (2x3, 3x2, are they the same? what's different?) etc, and doing simple arithmetic with actual objects. This is new to them and is fundamental to everything else.

2) Language - have adult conversations with your kids, and no not about adult topics, but with adult words and with adult grammar; no "baby-talk" in other words. And it's not about purposely choosing large and obscure words to obfuscate, but picking accurate words that probably leave little holes in understanding for the child to try and reason about. Hopefully they will ask if they don't know, or may even surmise correctly about word/phrase meaning. This might help with...

3) Reason/problem solving - Encourage experimentation in everything. If they see you constantly trying new things and failing gracefully and focusing more effort on finding solutions then hiding failures, you've taught them one of the most important lessons of all. Try, try, try many times, then go ask someone. You should be unquestionably the expert in some things, and a complete novice that asks questions and learns quickly in other things, and they should watch you in both situations. Seeing role models do both is an immensely powerful thing to observe to young children. It shows that adults can be both powerful professionals and learners. Where do you think they learn to laugh at, criticize, and fear failure? It's cultural. Make failure just another step to mastery.

4) Curious mindsets - in every category above, there are always opportunities to ask "why do you think this is?" or "how do you think this works?". You might get gibberish most of the time but it doesn't matter, they are going through the thought process and will get better with age. They need to be very comfortable with those questions at early ages and keep being willing to answer them. When they stop caring, THAT'S the problem.

So to try and answer your question more concretely, you can buy expensive toys made for programming but I don't see what it will accomplish. LEGOs are the gold standard, but really, every-day objects can do much of the above. Build a fort! Why are we building a fort? How do we do it? Tell me the steps for building a fort so we can do it again someday. How do we improve this fort? Tell me the steps for improving...

I truly think there is something there though, something from the open-source process that can make government more efficient and productive, but it's probably not in the way we are thinking. It probably looks less like software maintenance and more like science, dare I say political science. Crowd-source solutions and organize experiments across counties and states in a way that's data driven, not politics and need-for-reelection driven.

- nightly export to dropbox as plaintext and a backup as a type of json format with more metadata. If Workflowy goes away tomorrow, I have everything and can continue in an editor if I like. But until then, I use the pretty web interface.

- multiple device support. I am not going to mess with ssh on my mobile devices. I use Workflowy for everything from extended note-taking and long-form writing to quick pre-set searches on the go for reference; and that's on all my various interfaces (and sometimes other peoples too).

- Workflowy is easy enough for laypersons to view and/or collaborate in seconds. No setup necessary on their end.

I am a happy paying customer of theirs.

STEM training = literacy for the jobs we have now

Liberal arts training = big picture training for innovation that we have yet to do.

Remember this John Adams quote:

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

Education has moved in this direction, but our economy has not innovated alongside it to make work for them.

Or suddenly went proprietary.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stradivarius

Contracts make sense, and will probably be the first experiments with this. That seems to be what blockchain tech is tapping into first. I would think though that new languages developed for this would emphasize readability. Perhaps a wiki-style top layer for regular human reading where the definitions, terms, and links can be defined and standardized as code underneath and can do things like call to state or federal entities for rates, dates, numbers, or jurisdiction domains etc. upon "enforcement" (runtime).

Now your edit was really interesting. International trade/shipping might be ripe for automation in the future. Boats and drones might be able to simply upload the most recent contract and parse it into actionable rules, or, act on behalf of parameters set via the contract. Maybe delivery drones check local law dynamically on sale of weapons etc. so that it doesn't need to get hard-coded into the operating system.

I would add to this too, a little life-hacking: Try to design your daily workflow (things that take time such as cooking, dishes, etc.) using the same strategies you use in programming. Modular food strategies so that you can cook once (on the weekend for example) and put together various meals by adding only little things here and there that round out the nutrition and quantity throughout the week with minimal dishes to clean after. Don't underestimate the efficiency of a good blender and protein shakes!

Get the right tools for the job too, maybe a standing desk to improve focus?

Lastly, I would add make sure you are picking projects that you find important and are passionate about. Thinking about them wakes you up. Aim for importance to you, not just # of commits. There will always be people who just work faster then you, or where money is not a problem for them, or where what seems like their hobbies are very tied into their actual work and the two overlap and they just seem more productive. That is where you have to focus on importance and not breadth but depth of where you spend you time.

I feel that students have to start planning for college earlier and earlier these days, even planning how courses line up as early as middle school. When all academic scheduling decisions (sports, classes, extra curriculars, clubs, etc.) are always viewed through the lens of college admission, there is very little time to turn brains off and just play with the knowledge they've gained thus far. If an activity isn't directly linked to job training of one or two strong focuses that could potentially lead to a major in college and a job afterward, they aren't seriously considered as an activity worth spending time on, and that is a pity.

I would add lastly that as a counterbalance to this extreme need for academic focus, instead of seeking invigorating hobbies to which students at the end of the day will lack the energy for, they instead seek more mindless and passive activities which are readily available on their mobile devices. The harder they work, the dumber they want their hobbies to be.

[1] http://www.radiolab.org/story/brink/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_goat

So if the only reason for mining in currency blockchains is the incentive to earn, what would be the incentive for a private blockchain network that didn't incorporate a currency? Could it be that their incentive is the reduced cost (in fiat money) of doing business? So that they could in effect voluntarily do the verification part of mining without the need for currency incentives?

I would imagine that it shouldn't be too difficult to set up enough adversarial but voluntary mining parties in a huge financial system such as the US financial system to bring a collective sense of safety to that closed blockchain no?

[1] http://chain.com/

[2] http://blog.chain.com/post/99177371581/bitcoins-killer-apps

[1] https://coincenter.org/2015/05/wall-street-is-using-bitcoin-...

[2] http://www.nasdaq.com/article/is-a-blockchain-without-bitcoi...

I've been collecting for a number of years now, and interestingly, when I sort oldest to newest, I have a really interesting window into what I thought was important/newsworthy at that time and what I know to be important/newsworthy or timeless now. I wonder if I can use that information to help sharpen my own judgment?

One working example of this type of system is RacherOS[1] which I think could do what I'm proposing. I'm excited to see it mature. People can just package their app in a minimally sized container and be done with it. I think it's what the linux community really wants anyway (modularity and options) but adds the ability to switch without re-installation from scratch.

[1]http://rancher.com/rancher-os/