If you have nowhere to be and nothing to do for an hour (heck, even if you do) sit down and watch it.
Haha! That was quite a crazy ride!
What’s it about? I don’t have time, and need a very good reason to start watching.
I’m 10 minutes in and the best description so far seems to be “A celebration of computer science, information theory and code”. I’m definitely going to finish this.
Also there’s art.
One of those talks you have to watch no matter how busy you are. Thanks for posting this!
Some slides on engineering achievements that help us see things we couldn’t before (microscopes, photos from the moon). Game of life (this was a couple of months before Conway’s death ) I fastforwarded through most of that. [EDIT: but, my favorite part of the talk was the zooming view of an implementation of the GOL using elementary gates implemented in the GOL.] Several slides on unusual programming langauges, whitespace, rockstar, etc… let’s see what else, some slides on ML. the chihuahua-muffins picture and art derived from it. It may have been more interesting to me if I hadn’t seen so much of it before… or maybe had there been a bit more synthesis.
No “Rockstar-to-Julia” transpiler yet
I watched this with my 9 and 10 year old sons last night before bed. They thought it was great! It was nice for them to see computers as a means of exploring ideas rather than just consuming content, and to get excited about that.
The result is that I think I’m going to make them a skeleton program that opens a GTK window and let them write the code to calculate and draw Mandelbrot sets.
What about scratch ? I think it is really well adapted for introducing programming to children. A modern Logo ;). I use scratch with my kids, and you can introduce programming, physics and math with simple bouncing balls. @ffevotte told me that it was also suitable to code Conway’s game of life
Yes my kids have played with scratch, actually some Caltech students came to their school and taught it to a few classes last year.
@tamas_papp pointed me to Racket and bootstrap too
This morning they agreed to run through the Hour of Code on the bootstrap site and it was very good for their level. They’re most of the way done with that lesson, and I really liked the way it arranged the lesson in terms of slowly increasing complexity of building expressions.
I would definitely recommend it as a step up from scratch in terms of learning. Thanks @Tamas_Papp for the recommendation!
Wonderful! Loved it, thanks for sharing!