Edutopia - February/March 2008 - (Page 51) technology later in our lives—never even know it. We never realize that our desire to contact certain groups of people at certain times, or to lighten the load of repetitive work (say, grading papers), or to solve certain types of puzzles (like Sudoku), are really programming problems, and quite solvable ones at that. But some among us do realize this, and we hire young people—often our kids, students, or employees but equally often consultants selling solutions—to do the necessary programming for us. One result is that we nonprogrammers often get ripped off (charged a lot for something quite simple), say, by financial be able to recognize this fact and take matters into their own hands. The Digital “Scribe Tribe” Recently, programming languages “ordinary” people use have begun to emerge. Of these, one in particular—Flash, from Adobe—appears to be becoming a de facto standard. A great many kids in elementary school and the middle grades around the world are learning to program in Flash and are continually improving their skills as they advance through the grades. They use this tool and others like it (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Today’s kids already see their parents and teachers as the illiterate ones.” planners offering seemingly sophisticated tools that, were we the slightest bit “literate,” we could not only write ourselves but also customize specifically to our needs. That’s not how it will be in the future. As we move further into the twenty-first century, welleducated people who have needs and ideas addressable via programming will increasingly Scratch, for example) to communicate a wide range of information and emotion—from stories to logic to games to ideas to persuasive arguments to works of art—all through programming. And it seems to them not nerdy but, rather, sophisticated and advanced. The young people who do this vary greatly, of course, in the sophistication of what they can do. But sophisticated programming is becoming easier by the day. More and more premade programming objects—code written by others that can simply be plugged in to perform certain tasks—are available on the Internet, and are mostly free. These databases of premade parts greatly enhance students’ abilities, extend their programming and problem-solving capabilities, and shorten the time to get things done. In a sense, these bits of code are like an alphabet of programming. Recently, a friend was asked to program a “Wheel of Fortune” in Flash. Rather than taking a week to program it from scratch, he did a Web search, found something like what he wanted available free, and finished the project in an hour. With these increasingly available and findable pieces of code, the range of what one can do and communicate with programming can expand indefinitely. And though simpler programs such as Flash already allow a pretty good degree of sophistication, many young people, through game creation, Internet-tool creation, or other means, get into the more sophisticated programming languages of three-dimensional http://www.journeyed.com/ http://www.journeyed.com/finaldraft
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