The Raspberry Pi is succeeding in ways its makers almost imagined “Grandpa is getting pretty old. Out there all alone on that farm, he has no one to look in on him, just to see if he’s ok. He’ll use the landline, but he’s beyond of the range of mobile, and he’s never been really great with computers. No Skype or emails. Grandpa does have internet. So I built this for him.” The girl points …
Even when it still has that fresh-from-the-box look.
I Google everything. I'm in my early 30s and had the fortunate luck of going to an elementary school that was the first in the district that had a computer-based library catalog. I quickly learned the benefits of a keyword search, which now is almost detrimental in that you can get better results using natural language searches. When I meet a developer who's fresh from college or even as old as I am, I'm astounded by the number of times I get a, "I've never used X before, so I just pounded away until I got the result I wanted," response. And when asked if they bothered to look around online or use well-known sites to review similar scenarios, I get blank stares.
I hope more of these kids keep approaching things as problems waiting to be solved and are willing to not just lean on those who came before them, but then write up or share what they did so that another pre-teen (or developer I browbeat for wasting time) to stumble on to when faced with a similar issue.
All you can do is provide the tools and let the mind do its thing... and maybe get out of the way with all this bull about who should be doing what. If some kid who wants to be a dancer can also have the savvy to build out a small tool or trinket that solves a inconvenience or concern (like grandpa passing away and no one noticing), that's just something else they can lean on later in life when there are new tools or new minds that need inspiration.
The internet is amazing. A woman sitting next to me on the train asked me for directions to somewhere obscure in London. I'd no idea, but I did have a smartphone.
I support all our company's IT (under ten people, and we pay for Cloudy solutions for the many things I can't do). Years ago I used to struggle to fix PCs. I'm not in IT, I just use the things. Now I can just hit Google, find the right page on Microsoft's site (I wonder if they've fixed internal search on there yet?), found that there's a troubleshooter to fix Windows update, searched the code number it gave out, fixed it. Admittedly I should have thought to try the troubleshooters, as MS have written many of them, and they often now work, but I only fix a pooter every few months, so forget most stuff. But now the internet can remember for me. And I can search on my iPad, while the laptop is in front of me.
Or Google solved the worst emergency possible this Saturday morning. I'd forgotten to make bread on Friday night, as we were too busy drinking cocktails. Yum. What were we going to have with our bacon?!?! But I had some left over sour cream, and maple syrup. Can you make American pancakes with sour cream instead of buttermilk? Theoretically it's acidic, so should do the job. But what if our breakfast goes wrong and I'm forced to go to the shops before I've eaten my bacon? The thought was too horrible to contemplate! Found a couple of nice looking recipes in but a few taps of the iPad, made vanilla pancakes, and the recipe said that warm maple syrup was a human right, so I warmed it up (and it is indeed nice).
And the other day I found the legislation on consumer contracts and wrote a nice letter for a friend's Mum and got her back the £2k that some scumbags had legally scammed her out of. They forgot to update their terms and conditions when the legislation was updated in June. Ooops.
"I can bring up a web browser, and take photos inside grandpa’s house. Has he moved his coffee cup today? Is the telly on? At least then we’ll know he’s okay. And I can even type messages” - she changes focus to a textbox inside a web form - “that show up on top. We used ImageMagick for that part...here, you can see it in our code.”
ie. "Yipee! Now we don't have to visit Grandpa !"
Sorry about that.
"Completely at home with Raspberry Pis, these kids Google around for the things they don’t know how to do - because when you’re 11, you don’t know what you can’t do."
Perhaps not that different from programming your Dragon 32 in 1984, from a computer magazine.
Plonker,
Did you actually read TFA?
I would love my lad to come up with something like that.
It may be a little beyond your clearly limited intellect, but may I alert you to a few key points:
- most ~11 year olds cannot drive (legally) and don't usually own a road legal car
- not everyone lives about five minutes from their grandparents
I would be a little concerned if my lad (almost 7 now!), decided to hitch so thag he could see grandma, 300 miles is a fair schlepp for a sprog dontcha think?
Pleae retire to your cave...
Jay
Oh, for chrissakes.
I get the impression that the story is set in Australia. I live in Canberra, and I recently went to visit a friend of mine in a remote community in Western Australia. 1 hour flight to Sydney or Melbourne. 6 hour flight to Perth. 2 hour flight to small airport. 2 hour drive to small satellite town (not a farm). That's not including waiting for stopovers, which may entail an overnighter in Perth for the next daily flight to the small airport.
Maybe grandpa is not that easy to visit.
I get the impression that the story is set in Australia. I live in Canberra, and...
Whoops. My cynical "Grandad" joke was only meant to be a joke, not to upset this cheerful thread. Like Trixr, I also guessed the Australian thing and the great distances there. I confess to owning 2 Pis myself, and to using one of them to spy on my own empty house when I'm not there. And to being the author of several if the Pi Internet guides accessed by these kids. It's true that webcams are no substitute for a visit but everybody knows that anyway.
Smalltalk; an, or rather the, OO language that puts almost everything that came afterwards to shame
You mean the OO language designed (in its first public incarnation) to be unusable to people who are red-green colorblind? Yeah, good thinking there, tying the language to an IDE with ill-considered UI controls.
Other implementations were thankfully divorced from the IDE.
The IDE aside, Smalltalk suffers from the same problem all conceptually-pure programming languages suffer from. As a computer scientist, I like Smalltalk's purity and elegance. As a professional developer, I recognize that it's useless for nearly all of the problems I get paid to address, because it can't quickly and cheaply be integrated into a huge corpus of existing code, and it would necessarily introduce certain inefficiencies in resource-critical systems.
That doesn't mean there aren't problem domains where conceptually-pure languages like Smalltalk aren't well-suited - I'm just not (often) working in them. Or that there aren't existing systems that wouldn't be better off rewritten in Smalltalk or another pure language (so much truly abysmal C++ out there...) - but no one's going to fund that.
"unusable to people who are red-green colorblind" -- Michael Wojcik
Did you mean red/yellow/blue button? That's hardly unusable to the colourblind once you know which button is which finger. Unlike the (still) unusable pastel shades that are the defaults for much of Excel graphs and Powerpoint templates.
Scratch is an abomination. To be fair, pretty much every attempt at "visual programming" is.
The problem is all the "shapes" in a Scratch program are the shape of plain-text, linear code. Surely the biggest difficulty most newcomers to programming have is the fact that branching code is displayed linearly -- a visual language that retains that linearity rather than modelling the code flow therefore fails to address the main problems and serves little purpose.
For my son to come up with a project that a Pi (or similar) can be used on.
He tends to ask me to help him with more 'old-fashioned' problems, eg making Concorde-ish wing shape in Lego.
He's got access to How It Works magazine and publications from Maker and NoStarch Press so plenty of chances for inspiration to spark.
It may not of course, but he's got the opportunity and that's what Pi etc are for - making opportunities possible.
Have a look a the projects done with RCX / NXT / EV3.
A paper-roll plotter is a good one. As is writing names or just drawing patterns on a boiled egg (or a ping-pong ball, for practise). Or have an automated train as part of a LEGO GBC contraption to carry the balls back to the start.
Congratulations to these kids. Most impressive.
Reminds me of the old saying : "when you don't know what you can't do, you don't know you can't do it, so you find a solution".
These kids are finding solutions, and proving to themselves that they can do it. That is the best confidence-builder there is. I can't wait to see what they'll come up with next.
That old saying reminded me of one of Sir Ken Robinson's well known presentations about creativity in education, especially the bit about the 200ft high paperclip.
There seem to be a lot of other relevant clips on The RSA's YouTube channel as well, but the SKR one popped up in my mind first.
I can relate to that, it breaks my heart that my kids seem to be ruled by technology (play, play , play stupid bloody game apps) rather than ruling technology by making it do what they dream up. God knows I have enough "stuff" for them to use, Pis, Gallileo, Dash and Dot (by wondermaker) and all it does is gather dust. As for the kids who prototype stuff, really, really, well done, I hope you end up being the Linus Torvalds of the future.
> ruling technology by making it do what they dream up
Eh, I had a TRS-80 and suffered from the "ok, now what do I do with it?" syndrome myself, and I didn't have Minecraft to distract me.
That's still my problem today. I can implement the hell out of something if I can figure out something useful to implement.
When I bought my Apple II in 1979 the neighbours' "about -teens" kids used to play the games on it. As many of the games were written in BASIC it was easy to do "cheats" to increase lives etc. The kids wanted me to make the "cheats" - but were never interested in how the programs worked.
Thinking back to my similar age in the 1960s when transistors were becoming affordable and there were old radios and TVs for scavenging. At my Secondary Technical School we started a Radio and Electronics Club. Out of 500 boys there were possibly about a dozen who joined.
All of us came from families with no background in electronics etc. My own initiation was a transistor radio kit which my father had bought and couldn't get to work. The advert said "A child can build it" - and I did. No soldering needed - just a rats nest of wires joined with 8BA nuts and bolts.
The current crop of neighbours' kids like my Halloween and Xmas electronic SFX. Even though they are keen on Lego they show no interest in creating things from electronic and computer modules.
@Ally 1
I need that for myself -- a problem to solve (other than the problem of needing more experience with this sort of thing) and to be banned from my favourite game... I procrastinate too much.
I actually can think of two real-world problems to solve for myself but they'll require a lot of mechanical stuff, e.g. valves, solenoids, pumps.
It may be that your kids have not identified a "need" that really speaks to them. All of the examples given address something that might motivate a person: Looking out for Granddad; Ensuring fairness in netball; Saving your teacher from food-poisoning; Checking air quality for asthmatics. Given these problems, the kids were motivated to find a solution. My guess is that they believed that they could find a solution because of all of the inspiring and "modular" examples that are available via a quick Google search.
My son liked the demonstration of the giant clock in the pi Minecraft, and we moved on to altering the code to use different blocks and then using code to build a wall but that was as far as we got.
It would be easier I think if wed had a setup whereby we altered the code on a laptop and ran that code on the Pi into the TV rather than swapping between progs on the Pi. Easier to point to code and what it's doing.
minecraft! I curse my relatives for installing this shite on the tablet my daughter (8 year old) used when she was with them. I then took the kids on a week long canoing trip and I kept hearing how this or that landscape opening just in front of our eye (and they were truly stunning views) looks JUST like.. in the minecraft. Or mindcraft. Or what-fucking-ever craft. For the whole f... week I heard that. And you try to explain to a kid the disparity between a 6-inch, crude simulation and the real world around you! 3-seconds attention span, your time's up, the kids put the volume to "mute", and you can jammer away for hours :(
" I kept hearing how this or that landscape opening just in front of our eye (and they were truly stunning views) looks JUST like.. in the minecraft."
Just curious but would you have had the same reaction if your kids were saying this or that landscape looks just like something they'd built in Lego? Or something they'd seen in a documentary on TV? Or something they'd seen described in a book? Because I see little difference.
Just curious but would you have had the same reaction if your kids were saying this or that landscape looks just like something they'd built in Lego? Or something they'd seen in a documentary on TV? Or something they'd seen described in a book? Because I see little difference.
Yes, god forbid the little ones learn to draw comparisons and make analogies. Who knows what's next - critical thinking? This must be stopped!
nope, nothing ... it does not do minecraft well enough
Don't cut them short yet. Try asking them about 'redstone' sometimes, and if you get answers other than "I don't know redstone" then I'd advice you to pay close attention to whatever it is they're doing and / or have build.
Redstone circuitry within that "simple game of Minecraft" can even be used to build memory modules, CPU's, and sometimes even word processors or whole computers. Here's a nice example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_ULtNYRCbg
Just because people play Minecraft does not mean that they're doing nothing other than placing blocks to create 8-bit house environments ;)
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