[wplug] Coding

George Larson george.g.larson at gmail.com
Tue Mar 17 21:26:19 EDT 2009


Wow!

That's some well thought (and written) advice.  I'll look in to those
things, with him, and explore what might best suit him.

Daymon (my son) was passing by on his way to bed and I showed him the
options that you suggested.  We're both excited.  :)

Thank you so much for the time, effort, consideration and compassion
involved!!
G

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Christopher DeMarco <demarco at maya.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 08:39:03PM -0400, George Larson wrote:
>
> >    Advice??
>
> I kinda feel like the kid's interests and aptitudes are the most
> important factor.
>
> If he's interested in and/or good at math, then programming
> Mathematica, gnuplot or matlab might be really fascinating.  If you're
> like me, you can grok the language but since you know nuts about the
> *domain*, it's frustrating and useless - but for a kid who digs this
> stuff, it's like candy.
>
> A kid who's artistically inclined might get satisfaction from making
> beautiful things in Flash or Processing.  Or write Python scripts in
> the Gimp.  Adobe has a bunch of magical products these days (I think
> Air is one?).
>
> Organized types could explore Dot (for import into Graphviz or
> Omnigraffle) and visualize things like family trees.  Or write
> Word/OpenOffice macros to personalize holiday letters/cards.
> Visualize traffic patterns or gas prices or baseball card prices or
> anything else for which datasets exist, using Processing or the
> AMAZING Google Charts.  Overlay GPS tracks on Google Maps.
>
> Some kids might get a kick out of writing games -- the Elder Scrolls,
> Neverwinter Nights and many others have fairly interesting programming
> environments built in.  Microsoft's XNA Creators Club is a REAL game
> development environment for the Xbox360.  I believe that sites like
> Kongregate host toolkits for Flash game creation.
>
> Build Greasemonkey extensions for Firefox to do weird and wonderful
> stuff with the web.  Build CSS skins for the family website -- you do
> have a family website, right!?  Experiment with porting the whole
> thing to a CMS, and then write plugins.  All major OSes are
> "skinnable", perhaps with add-on software -- build some skins.
>
> Get issues of Make magazine that deal with "circuit bending" or other
> home electronic projects: EE is close enough to programing for your
> purposes.  Wire up some rudimentary circuits.  If they do something
> *useful*, all the better!
>
> Some kids groove on systems.  Dig around in the Internet protocols:
> teach Python to send email, or even text messages.  Setup a toy
> webserver.  Flash the firmware on your Linksys with Linux, and
> re-configure your home network.  Program your TiVo.
>
> Play with PGP, or pen-test your home network.  Setup a web filter
> blocking his favorite sites and wager him a new computer that he can't
> break out.
>
> Lego Mindstorms rock.  iRobot (think Roomba) sells a development
> platform.  Pleo is programmable.  So is Second Life.
>
> Get him interested -- kids want to emulate their parents, but when he
> sees how much hard work it is, he will lose interest in "doing it
> too."  But if you get him hooked on something that's as intrinsically
> interesting to him as PHP is to you, he'll stick with it.  Remember
> that the tools aren't the point: find his goals, his triggers and his
> pain points and get him to address them with technology.
>
>
> --
> Christopher DeMarco <demarco at maya.com>
> IT Director
> MAYA Group
> +1-412-708-9660
>
> _______________________________________________
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> wplug at wplug.org
> http://www.wplug.org/mailman/listinfo/wplug
>
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