Comments on: baby steps and bold moves

By: open source workshop | the evolving ultrasaurus

open source workshop | the evolving ultrasaurus — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:02:50 +0000

[…] who wanted to help. With the force of the community behind us, the first workshop became a bold move with 62 attendees, 15 volunteers, and 7 simulataneous […]

By: links for 2009-05-05 « Amy G. Dala

links for 2009-05-05 « Amy G. Dala — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:02:10 +0000

[…] baby steps and bold moves | the evolving ultrasaurus (tags: gender ruby computing) […]

By: Chrononautic Log 改 » Blog Archive » GeekGenderFail ’09 postscript

Tue, 05 May 2009 10:27:14 +0000

[…] After following a few links from Virginia DeBolt’s post (see under updates, below), I will say that the SF community could learn a lot from the Rails community’s progressive faction’s apparent ability to quickly move toward fixing the problem. […]

By: Sarah Mei » My drop in the bucket

Sarah Mei » My drop in the bucket — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:38:00 +0000

[…] offering a free workshop in San Francisco to reach out to women who want to learn Ruby and Rails. Sarah Allen and I are spearheading with the assistance of the San Francisco Ruby Meetup and Devchix and (your […]

By: Sarah

Sarah — Sun, 03 May 2009 23:54:52 +0000

FreeGeek sounds like an awesome program. Wish there was one in SF. It would be a great place to hold summer classes. It may be a little late to do something this summer unless we latch on the an existing program… although it may be worth looking around for one. Great ideas!

Saraf

By: John Haltiwanger

John Haltiwanger — Sun, 03 May 2009 21:23:28 +0000

Well, it’s a little more sophisticated than that, but still vague. I’d like to spend significant time volunteering at FreeGeek centers when I return to the WC (specifically Oly, PTown, and SeaTac but hopfully CA as well) this summer. (Please forgive the repost, but what I had submitted previously sounded stupidly naive.)

I’m sending the donate box around. Has the mailing list started yet?

By: John Haltiwanger

John Haltiwanger — Sun, 03 May 2009 21:06:47 +0000

Perhaps a summer program might be a good way to start? It seems like it might be easier to set up, and would select from a wider potential pool (district versus school). Might be more affordable too. I may be available as a volunteer/organizer and/or fundraiser, as I have no plans for a real job this summer, only a vague desire to go West and meet cool people.

By: clibou

clibou — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:01:05 +0000

Big Bold Steps, But Baby Steps…

Is Ruby jumping the gun?

Consider the brightest most select group of students I can imagine learn programing at Stanford and many other top universities by starting with Karel the Robot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LoKDDRlfZc

Karel – “By initially limiting the student’s language repertoire to easily grasped imperative commands whose actions are visually displayed, the Karel approach quickly introduces students to such concepts as procedures and the major control structures.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_(programming_language)

As proof, at last years SV Codecamp http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/ wI volunteered at GAE session http://tinyurl.com/csj49v and due to huge demand, later at a Bebo day for teen kids run by SVWebBuilder.org. But in both cases, those kids who already had programing experience excelled, those without were left behind.

Bottom line, find a simple Ruby project designed for teaching programming, or use Karel to reach new programmers.

However accomplished
Props @ All

I will back for TA ops

By: Greg Borenstein

Greg Borenstein — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 07:32:50 +0000

I’m both flattered and thrilled that you found my Ruby Arduino project inspiring on the learning programming front. I definitely think that being able to write a program that actually causes something to blink or move in the real world is thrilling and motivating in a whole different way than what happens on the screen, especially for people who are more hands-on thinkers than your typical programmer. One of my big motivations for writing RAD is to make learning physical computing as easy for beginners as it can possibly be. Arduino is a great project from an educational standpoint and it’s taken this stuff from the deeply technical to the human, but I think the beauty and elegance of Ruby can take it even further. For beginners, all the “program junk” (type declarations, curly braces, etc) can be a pretty big obstacle when they’re just trying to concentrate on the basics.

Anyway, if I can help in anyway with your attempts to learn or teach Arduino please don’t hesitate to contact me. In addition to myself, I’ve got access to a very vibrant community around this stuff up in Portland (including the creator of the Dorkboard) that has put on a ton of great educational events and could definitely help with educational materials.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 04:06:15 +0000

It wasn’t so much that I took the music video literally, but rather took the opportunity to clearly illustrate that the diversity issue goes beyond gender imbalance, and , with the hub-bub in the blog-o-sphere and twitterverse, I thought it a good way to put the whole thing in perspective.

I think the Anita Borg foundation could be a great resource. They may even have some on-going projects that would fit. I also love the idea of a fund to help women speakers travel to events. It would be cool to have a mailing list for folks who donate to the fund, then we could all decide how to focus efforts.