How do we make the public understand programming?

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

In response to a recent survey telling us that schools are getting the teaching of Information Technology all wrong by not including “computer programs” in the syllabus, the BBC has offered up seven questions about computer programs. I urge you to take the quick quiz and then come back here when you’re done.

I scored five out of seven. I don’t know the correct HTML for inserting an image, and I couldn’t work out which subset of acronyms the question with GNU in it was driving at, mainly because the preceding five questions were not about “computer programs” at all; they were about the history of the people who happened to be involved in the invention of programming, either as a general concept (Jaquard) or as an incredibly early implementation (Hopper and COBOL).

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How to keep the kids entertained during the summer holidays

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

Typically, the heatwave of early summer has disappeared just in time for the school holidays. But if you’re scratching around for something to do with the kids on a rainy day why not try, well, Scratch.

Scratch is a brilliantly simple programming language designed for kids. Instead of relying on lines of intimidating code, it uses a colourful, building-block style interface to introduce children to the basic computational concepts.

We’ve written a Scratch tutorial as part of our Give Your Kids the IT Edge feature in this month’s magazine (on sale now). Our tutorial shows you how to make your child the star of their very own computer game, in which they have to try and escape from a crab that keeps nipping at its toes. Your child does everything from programming the movements of the characters, to recording sound effects, to creating the scoreboard. Best of all, the software is completely free – just download it from the Scratch website.

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When to use Stored Procedures

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

Version 5 of MySQL added Stored Procedures and, as is often the case when you’ve been using earlier versions, I didn’t notice at all, until a client asked whether the site I’m building for him should be using this technique for interacting with a database. In this case, the answer is a resounding no since it would add an unnecessary level of complexity to a site in which the MySQL queries rarely involve more than one table at a time.

So, when should they be used?

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The joy of interfacing

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

So anyway, get yourself into your time machine and set it for sometime around 1986. Once you get there, pop on your invisibility cloak, find someone who looks spoddy and follow them into the dining room. See that BBC Micro in the corner? Pop over and give the top a quick tug. Chances are it’s not screwed down.

That’s because, in the old days, computers were for hobbyists with soldering irons, and they were forever taking the tops off to install new circuit boards they’d made.

Doesn’t happen much anymore, of course – you might pop the side off once a year to install a new graphics card, but most people wouldn’t consider actually building new hardware to go inside their computer. And for very good reason: the insides of a modern PC are massively more complex and to build an add-on part yourself that would actually be any use is more or less impossible.

Thing is though, designing and connecting your own hardware to a PC, while unlikely to win you admiring glances from the opposite sex, is bloody good fun. Fact. I’ve been tinkering with the whole area again for the past year or so – for reasons I may document at some point – and it turns out that there’s a massive array of components that are relatively easy to interface to a PC and do interesting things with. (more…)