Phrogram

It's becoming a common refrain

davidw — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:25:00 GMT

Yet another article about the "mismatch." The manufacturing sector of the economy is creating new jobs, but many remain unfilled because there are too few "potential hires" that have the right set of skills.

Here's a link to the Reuters article that describes the situation in detail. But some disturbing trends are worth flagging:

"... American colleges are producing fewer math and science graduates as students favor social sciences, whose workload is perceived to be manageable, leading to a skills mismatch. Math, engineering, technology and computer science students accounted for about 11.1 percent of college graduates in 1980, according to government data. That share dropped to about 8.9 percent in 2009."

"The problem is sufficiently serious that businesses are pushing Congress to address the issue of visas and help them hire more high-skilled foreigners."

So, at the end point in our nation's academic pipeline, when a new college graduate has been freshly minted and is ready to join the workforce, what is happening? The job he or she is trained to do, involving what may be termed a "softer" set of skills - selling, counseling, advising, writing, marketing - are too few and the higher paying job for someone with a math or science background goes unfilled.

Without making this about anything other than the overall trend, we don't need more high-skilled foreigners. We need to address the inevitable culmination of a failure of educational policy and vision by rethinking how we present, teach and encourage STEM disciplines at all phases of a typical student's academic lifespan.

Computational thinking is still lagging at the K-12 level... why?

davidw — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 23:02:00 GMT

Last month, the Chair of the Education Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the leading trade group for computer science professionals, issued a press release to say that the we still need to do more to strengthen computational thinking at the K-12 level . Here are links to the ACM press release and a news report on its contents.

The interesting thing about this is that while improvements in readiness to study computer science at the college level are still low, it's clearly "not for lack of trying." In the last several years, at least two tools have become widely distributed in American classrooms from major universities well known for their prowess at CS education - Alice from CMU, Scratch from MIT. These efforts are backed by extensive (and free) resources and training programs. And yet, the situation does not seem to be getting any better. A recently published letter from the Computing is Core Coalition says it best:

"The state of K-12 computer science education has major consequences. Despite tremendous job opportunities that computer science knowledge offers:

Participation in AP Computer Science has been flat for a decade;
Interest in majoring in computer science among incoming freshman is low; and
There is little ethnic and gender diversity among those who take computer science courses

As schools have increasingly stepped up the integration, use, and teaching of information technology, distinctions between these areas and computer science have blurred. Educators and policy makers consistently confuse the use of technology and teaching of technology literacy with teaching computer science as a core academic discipline within the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields."

From the Phrogram project's perspective, the tools now widely in use attempt to avoid teaching the one thing that computational thinking is really all about - code. In fact, "code" may be a four-letter word to K-12 educators using Alice and Scratch. Here is how a typical description on the virtues of the Alice approach reads:

"The use of the drag-and-drop programming paradigm causes Alice to be much more accessible to beginning programming students than languages such as Java, C++, and C# that require extensive keyboard activity for use. A student who can type a few strings with one finger and operate a finger-driven mouse pad can write Alice programs just as rapidly and effectively as a student who can type 60 wpm."

So the issue is, would K-12 education on computer science do better if it embraced, rather than tried to hide, software code?

We often hear that a reason to avoid code is that kids hate to type. Well, if the source code of a sample program is already created, and the student's job is to learn how to modify it to make it do different things, would it be better? The idea here is to show students that real programming is a code-driven exercise. Thinking about how code changes how programming works is therefore an inescapable - and not necessarily bad - way to learn programming.

The question becomes, can we change teachers' minds about "students hate typing so typing is bad; therefore source code is bad"?

Given the fact that experts in the field suggest that the products now widely in use don't seem to be helping achieve the desired outcome, maybe t's worth a try!

Putting computers to better use in K-12 education

davidw — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 20:18:00 GMT

Columns by journalists who write for general audiences seem to get into the subject of what is holding back America in terms of global competitiveness fairly often. I can't resist flagging them here and commenting myself, admittedly a bit on the obvious.

Thomas L. Friedman wrote in his Nov 24 column in the NY Times about U.S.G. (US Government) and P.T.A. (Parent Teacher Associations). He noted three things that make unemployment a more stubborn problem in America than it has been in the past:

Global competition is stiffer
Technology advances have eliminated lower paying jobs (those which can be done at an even lower cost, and often even more effectively, by machines)
America is slipping behind its industrialized world "peers" in "global test scores in math and critical thinking"

One comment in particular resonated with me. "Now the best-educated workers, capable of doing the critical thinking that machines can't do, get richer while the least educated get pink slips." Meanwhile, today's story in the NY Times tells the tale of a continually depressing trend: "Disappointing job growth as unemployment rate hits 9.8%." And yet, if you look at Jobster, LinkedIn, Monster, or any other job-search website, you'll see plenty of jobs that require solid (or even just decent!) STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) skills.

The problem is, our educational system is simply not producing enough new graduates with that background.

Let's compare Mr. Friedman's comments with a "viewpoint" article in this month's "Communications of the ACM," (a great magazine by the way, although well over my head for the most part!). The authors try to develop a more precise model for the oft-used term of teaching "computational thinking" at the K-12 level. They point out something that I believe often gets overlooked in the discussion about how to use computers as a teaching tool at the K-12 level. which is that a computer can deliver visual representations that help students learn. Here's the quote I found interesting:

"One can view computational science as the interaction between the human and the computer that is contained within the box where a human being formulates a problem and provides a representation suitable for a computer. The computer then acts on this representation and returns the results of these actions through, for example, a visual representation. Computational learning expands this interaction by allowing the computer to add foundational knowledge, not just data, unknown to the human and by having the result of the computer's actions represented in a form compatible with the human's current capacity for abstraction."

Admittedly, that's pretty dense (well, the whole magazine is ) but what I'm getting from this (and from the entire article) is that we need to do better in putting computers to use in K-12 classrooms, to show how powerful they can be, not just how to use them to turn in assignments, or make presentations, or write papers. If we show a student how to master anything that a computer can do, that in turn will demonstrate to the student how powerful he or she can be and that in turn will inspire them to do even more. In my view, that's the highest and best use of a computer as an educational tool in the classroom (although of course, there are otherss).

Nearly 30 years after the PC revolution (I bought an Apple //e in 1982), and with some glaring exceptions, the availability of computers in U.S. classrooms is not the issue. The issue is how we use them as teaching tools. Our kids even have computers in their pockets nowadays, in the form of their mobile phones. It's great that there are countless applications we can use to make our computers effective communication tools (texting, of course, but also word processing, "powerpoint" slides, whatever). But to develop a K-12 student's critical thinking skills in general, and his or her STEM skills in particular - the skills that today's (and even moreso, tomorrow's) employers crave - we need to use computers to learn how to think, not just how to communicate.

D.I.Y. Programming, Programmers & Oxymorons

davidw — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 05:34:00 GMT

A recent article in The New York Times that reviewed Google App Inventor ("D.I.Y. Tool For Apps Needs Work") has an interesting take on the experience of dragging-and-dropping "color-coded blocks" into something resembling a functioning app for Android. Apart from noting the current bugginess of the tool, which is still in "beta" release, the author of the review had a larger point to make:

"Truth is, Android App Inventor is only the latest in a long line of 'programming for the rest of us' kits: HyperCard, Automator, Scratch and so on. Each, at is debut, was hailed as a breakthrough. Each promised the dawn of a new era. And not a single one wound up delivering the idiot-proof, drag-and-drop software-creation process they promised. It may well be that “programming for nonprogrammers” is simply an oxymoron."

Compare this conclusion to a recent blog post entitled "4 Tools for Teaching Kids to Code," the author starts with a premise that I definitely agree with: "As our world becomes more tech-oriented, educators are faced with not just teaching children how to use computers, but how to build and program them as well." He then goes on to list Scratch, App Inventor, Alice and Lego Mindstorms as "great tools to teach programming to K-12 students."

However, when you take a closer look at them, you'll find that each of these "4 tools" is not about learning how "to code" but rather how to avoid code and still learn programming. But grasping how to "drag and drop" blocks of instructions so that, when placed in a semantically sensical order, they "do something," is not the same thing as grasping how to write code. Writing code requires understanding the syntax of a language and using its commands and functions to create a structure for a program. That requires learning the language to be used for writing the program. Focusing on dragging and dropping essentially tells the learner, you don't need to think about code (that is instructions) or languages - at least not yet. You just need to think about putting "blocks" on top of each other. Sounds maybe a bit too simplistic - even for little kids who put away playing with blocks after kindergarten.

Some educators apparently think that writing code is too hard, or beginners will find it too boring, or it just isn't necessary to learn how to create software. Phrogram has a different approach. Sure, the "graphical user interface" (or GUI, for the acronym-prone) revolutionized computing into the everyday activity that it is now for millions of people across the world. And in using the commercial applications that we install on our computers, we don't need to think about the code behind them. But from a creator's - rather than a user's - standpoint, to make your own software, code (whether interpreted from script or compiled from source) still has an essential place. Establishing a strong foundation in programming means learning what it takes to write code, and there is no point in hiding that challenge until some eventual "later." If the language you are coding in is designed to make the code as "plain language" like as possible, then the notion that coding is inherently too hard to learn is just plain wrong.

As digital technologies continue their transformation of the skills that people must have to succeed in modern society, the ability to "code" cannot remain the exclusive domain of professional programmers. Over the next few decades, being able to code will be similar to being able to read, write and do arithmetic. It's just going to be part of the fundamental skill set that most literate people will need to have. So maybe it's time to look past the idea that avoiding code is the key to success in opening the door to learning programming. From another point of view, embracing code. and making it easier to do, even from the start, may be a much better way to give people the skills to "D.I.Y." their own apps.

If Life "runs on code," how can we catch it?

davidw — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:56:00 GMT

Microsoft Visual Studio (VS) 2010 was officially released on Monday (April 12). Looks like it's got a lot of nice new features. Here is an interesting excerpt of how Microsoft is marketing VS 2010 to the IT community - it's the blurb from the ad Microsoft is running about VS 2010 in this week's issue of Information Week:

Code. It's used to create the things that are all around us. Almost everywhere you look, it's there. ... [tagline] Life Runs on Code."

As one of the guys on the Phrogram team, this certainly resonates: if you want to learn programming, or you want to get a student interested in learning programming, don't "step away from the code" - in fact, embrace it. Code is the container that holds the power that makes programming capable of doing fascinating things. Phrogram is an attempt to make code more friendly to use, write - dare I say "play with," - - although it certainly still takes effort and focus to get into it. As one of our users noted in a post recently:

One very useful thing to note -- correction, two, are the following. Phrogram is as close to English as you will get. The non-programming part of my family does not understand Phrogram. See the conflict?

Actually, the conflict may be that by default these days, we all seem to shy away from something does not look all that easy to do, unless we can be shown exactly how to do it. Learning how to write code - and thereby discovering the world of real programming - is not the kind of thing you can spoonfeed either yourself or other people. You have to "wallow" in it a bit, all by yourself. I don't come from a technical background so I am continually learning this myself as I continue to work on the Phrogram project and try to learn programming on my own. I recently took an extension class in PHP at a local university. The instructor insisted (in more or less words) that we "get in there and write out your code longhand, even if you can find shortcuts." Early on at least, it's the only way to make it stick. This may not seem directly pertinent, but I think a recent post in Brendan Murphy's blog goes to the deeper issue of learning effectively.

"Students have been socialized into thinking school is a place where knowledge is given not developed. Students generally don’t or won’t think for themselves. If we start slow we can re-teach our students to use their own brains. If students are asked to use what they know to solve problems without being [led] by the hand eventually they will start to work on their own. The end goal of course is to get students to put some value on the knowledge they possess. I guess in the hope that they will apply it when needed."

There may be a "conflict" that some folks have in diving into code, and code avoidance seems to be the preferred approach for some educators so that programming doesn't look so "un-fun." But there are other ways to look at it. Code, as much as words and numbers, really is what life runs on these days, and if you truly want to be literate as the world continues to move ahead at an astonishing innovative pace over the next few decades, the last thing you should say to yourself (or, if you are an educator, your students) is that when it comes to code, don't worry, you can still learn programming and safely look the other way.

Turning today's young minds into tomorrow's computer engineers

davidw — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:59:00 GMT

Two very different press clippings - one a serious opinion, the other an amusing news story, caught my eye this week.

The first was news that Barbie, that ever-popular, multi-talented doll from Mattel, is now a computer engineer. As reported in Computerworld, "For the first time, the company took an online vote, asking people to select the Barbie doll's 125th career by choosing between architect, computer engineer, environmentalist, news anchor or surgeon. And voters chose the high-tech job."

Isn't it amazing - at least somewhat - that the people who got around to voting on Barbie's next career, with all the other interesting options being offered, would choose to see her become a computer engineer rather than a news anchor or an architect, or even a surgeon? I haven't examined how the vote was held, or whether there is other data that may have affected the result, or may have been gleaned from the polling process, but I see this as a sign of widespread - and probably growing - recognition of the importance of computer engineering and its huge relevance as a career path in today's world. And that's highly positive.

The second clipping, much more serious, was Tom Friedman's February 10 op-ed piece in the New York Times. Taking a look at the country of Yemen, which has been in the news lately as a breeding ground of dangerous extremists, Tom noted an interesting trend in the country's educational system - namely, that teaching has become much more narrowly focused on cultural and religious doctrine and much less broadly focused on modern academic subjects. Tom offered this "rule of thumb: For every Predator missle we fire at an Al Qaeda target [there], we should help Yemen build 50 new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking - for boys and girls."

To me, both of these press clippings are about (in very broad and very different senses) young people discovering the wonder, fascination and fun of learning abstract concepts, practical problem-solving skills and rigorous habits of mind that will help them, in the long run, do interesting things with their lives. How do kids normally make these discoveries? Through education ... and play.

Of course, education and play can be about a million different productive, useful, and beautiful things, and it goes without saying that the vast majority of them are not within the direct purview of what professional educators have taken to calling "STEM" - science, technology, engineering and math. Nor do they need to be. But there is an ever-growing need for talented minds to take on the many challenges facing our hyper-communicative, data-driven, analytically oriented, and science-focused world, so wouldn't it be great if we - all of us, in every nation - more effectively, and earlier on, teach the skills that lead to a lifelong interest in STEM skills and competencies?

In fact, what greater challenge is there for today's global generation of working adults than to prepare the next generation to step into a skilled workforce that the world's many industries, environments, and professions will require, in the decades to come?

Multi-school pilot teaching programming in Léon, Spain - with Phrogram

davidw — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:39:00 GMT

Here is a link to an article about an educational project in Léon and Ponferrada, Spain, where young students in ~ 20 schools learned programming with Phrogram. The article is in Spanish; below is an attempt at an English translation - no doubt, imperfect! (I added a few clarifications in brackets.) Here is a link to a press release we issued about this project about a year ago. It did not get much coverage in English-language press, but it turned out to be a very successful project!

Phrogram's presence in schools - at all levels of education - continues to grow. It is in elementary schools, all the way to "intro to CS" courses at the college level (e.g., at The Ohio State University and the University of Michigan). We recently added the 25th school licensee in the US and Canada and there are many other schools and programs teaching Phrogram in Europe, Israel, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand - - and probably a few more points in between.

If you are a teacher and would like to see a list, or get some teacher references, email info@phrogram.com. The more educators who hear about Phrogram, the more likely it is that students will have the chance to learn real programming sooner rather than later. In the 21st century "digital economy," the educational benefits of this learning path, in building science and math skills and preparing for tomorrow's careers, is pretty obvious.

So if you have the interest, thanks in advance for helping to spread the word!

===============

Abstract: 569 students of Leon became computer science programmers in a pioneering project. The children, from 50 schools of Leon and Ponferrada, presented and displayed 127 projects using programming tools to computer science engineers. Besides establishing a foundation that provides a qualitative jump in technological education, the project was able to harness the abstraction and logical reasoning skills of the children who participated. The project has culminated with awards given in the "First Contest of Children's Programming of Castile and León".

Article: During 2008-2009, 569 10-year old students in schools in Leon and Ponferrada learned how to program using development tools that until a few years ago, only computer engineers would have used. This pioneering pilot project gave a qualitative jump in technology education to students who were once mere users, helping them become programmers. The project, known as “DIVIÉRTETE PROGRAMMING,” provided an introduction to a programming language for children, and demonstrated that not only is it possible to teach to programming logic and language syntax to our children, but that it also awakens in them the desire to learn more, combining their imagination with their awareness that they have the ability to create their own technology.

The original development of this project was with KPL, or Kid´s Programming Language, a simple programming language for children, which was used to facilitate the learning of programming in a lasting way and pleasant form. The students who participated harnessed capacities of abstraction and logical reasoning that resulted in 127 projects coming from in group, more than half of which were evaluated very positively. [Blogger's note: KPL is the predecessor of Phrogram and the project was "scoped" in 2006-07; the actual project was done with Phrogram, but it was designed with KPL.]

Tomas Castro, President of ALETIC [which managed the program], said that this pioneering project facilitates the improvement of the educational system, oriented toward a change in the country's productivity model based on innovation and information technology. "The results of this initiative should help to inspire more of our young people, since the future of new technologies resides in their hands.” Sergio, a student in the project, explained that “in the course, we had to understand how the computer took our instructions to make our programs. Before, I happened to be a user, now I can be a programmer.”

The project was staffed with 10 professionals in the programming language PHROGRAM (KPL II). Groups of 10 or 15 students of 9 to 14 years in 21 schools of Leon and Ponferrada participated. The program has been developed throughout 9 months and each has been distributed in 2 weekly extra-curricular classes scheduled for one hour. As a finishing touch, the students in the project were celebrated in the Contest for children's programming in Castile and Leon for children 9-14 years of age.

DIY digital technology: worth learning, to advance

davidw — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 05:14:00 GMT

DIY ... "do it yourself."

A recent New York Times article and blog post take note of the growing importance of learning computing skills in a broader way - not just how to use software, but how to create your own software. As the start-up entrepreneur might say to the venture capitalist, this is the "mega-trend" that Phrogram is focused on.

Most students in the educational mainstream nowadays have at least some proficiency with computers. If you are a student, you probably sit in front of one, either in the computer lab, or the classroom, or at home, at some point (or at several points) over the course of a typical day. Teachers also use computers more than ever, to track progress, grade quizzes and assignments, and communicate with students. In this respect, the world of education is no different than virtually any other realm of society in the today's digital age, especially in the more industrialized world.

As the concept of computing goes beyond the personal computer, just about any device can become intelligent or, as we hear so often for phones, "smart." So, now that we have all this digital technology at our disposal, how can we most effectively use it? In the "end user" (as opposed to the "IT infrastructure") world, your personal, team, or organizational productivity and/or entertainment are what matters most to those companies and vendors that try to get you to use their software products. Phrogram is no different, but we do have a focus that is particularly relevant to the ever-increasing pervasiveness of digital technology as an activity and a pastime ...

Our mission is for people who use our software to become more proficient at creating their own software.

Digital technology will continue to advance, so to keep pace in your understanding of what you can do with it will continue to be an ongoing challenge. How can each of us harness our knowledge of digital technology into marketable skills? As these NYT reports make clear, in whatever field you choose to pursue, learning how to "do it yourself" can be a key to your success. If you focus on what can you create with your own digital technology - not just how to use the technology already in front of you - think of where it may lead in helping you achieve your goals for the future.

Why isn't Phrogram open source?

davidw — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:41:00 GMT

If you follow the computing world, you probably know about open source vs. commercial software. Phrogram is commercial - not open source, meaning it comes from a software vendor like Microsoft or Adobe (only not quite as big ) - and you can't see the source code behind it. It installs only in a compiled (binary code) form.

You can download open source software from the Web for free (with donations frequently encouraged) and see the source code. If you modify the source, you need to contribute your modifications back to the open source "project" for the benefit of others who also use it. Also, if you create new software that is based on "open source" software, you must also treat your new software as open source. (I don't mean to give legal advice; this is just a non-professional overview of how open source software licensing generally works). Open source is an incredibly important, vibrant and growing part of the software development world and you can find an open source project for just about any aspect of computing. It is hard to overestimate its value and importance ; in fact, Phrogram 3.0 will use a graphics engine called Axiom, licensed under the GNU's LGPL which means (roughly) that as long as its use within commercial software doesn't make up the bulk of the functionality of that software (which is true in Phrogram's case), you don't need to treat the resulting product as open source.

All of which leads me to the topic of this post ... why not make Phrogram open source and give it away?

Other educational software products for programming are open source, including Alice and Scratch. In their cases, the source code is managed by their teams, not the community. And herein lies a key difference between Alice and Scratch (on one hand), and Phrogram (on the other). They are from academic institutions (CMU and MIT respectively), and the universities that own them make them available for free. That is great, and something they can do because their funding comes from other sources. Phrogram, however, is the work of a team of professional developers who wanted to help their own kids (or their friends' kids) understand what they did for a living - - that is, programming - which consists primarily of writing, testing and debugging code. As working developers, the Phrogram team cannot expect to support our business unless we can sell its end product, which is our software. But you may ask, aren't there companies that have made a business out of selling services for open source software? Why not be like them? Then, Phrogram could be just like Alice and Scratch as an alternative way to teach programming even without the support of an academic institution (thus avoiding having to "force" potential users to make the hard "economic calculus" of whether it's "worth it").

Well, to respond, check out a recent article in the New York Times, that says it better than I could - "Open Source as a model for business is elusive." The article explains that with very few exceptions, open source projects end up costing time and money, not making it. Yes, there is MySQL which sold itself for $1 billion to Sun and stayed open source, and Red Hat, which makes money on its services rather than the Linux software it distributes but ... and this is a big but ... those are extremely rare exceptions to the general rule. If you want to sustain something by having it pay its own bills, and maybe even being compensated for your time (and you are not on a university's payroll), you really have no choice but to be commercial. KPL, by the way, which was free, tried to rely on contributions like many free software products do - and it didn't work (it very rarely does).

I write all this because I like open source,and understand its value, especially for the educational market. The question is, if you are evaluating Phrogram against free alternatives like Scratch or Alice, decide which of these products best serves your purposes of learning or teaching programming. if you don't want to use an abstraction layer and want to more clearly see what the "real thing" looks like, in terms of writing the code for your software, then consider Phrogram. It's not a lot of money, and even with tight school budgets and built-in defense mechanisms against software from a company that you may have never heard of before, it may very well be "worth it."

K-12 CS "aspirations and realities"

davidw — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:26:00 GMT

Springer has just published a new volume entitled "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" which includes a book chapter entitled:

K-12 Computer Science: Aspirations, Realities, and Challenges

One chapter, written by Allen B. Tucker of Bowdoin College, surveys the last 4-5 years of effort in fostering computer science as a field of study at the K-12 level, including the development of the ACM K-12 Model Curriculum. One of Professor Tucker's conclusions is worth quoting:

"The main surprise during this period is that major inroads for K-12 computer science education are largely accomplished through grass-roots efforts, almost one school at a time. While a growing percentage of all school districts now offer computer science, top-down systemic buy-in for computer science at the state curriculum standards level has still not occurred in any significant way."

This has certainly been true of my interaction with schools about Phrogram. After a school expresses an interest, it is from a teacher who contacts us and attempts to obtain the approval of his or her school's administration to teach with Phrogram. Our challenge is that there are free alternatives, which come from better known, academically accredited, sources - particularly Alice (from CMU) and Scratch (from MIT). They both have excellent documentation and web support, and its hard to argue when a teacher tells us "we have to go with what's free." But we continue to strive to introduce Phrogram where teachers want to go with an approach that highlights (rather than attempts to remove) the "coding" aspects of programming. Although that approach certainly has its merits (as discussed in at least one other article in this book, the one written by Brauner, on avoiding syntax errors the distraction of which can impede the teaching of underlying concepts), our approach is to "demystify" the coding aspect of programming at the earliest possible time, to help establish the solid foundation and appreciation for how it is essential to a true understanding of programming

Coding games with Flash & Actionscript

davidw — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:50:00 GMT

There's an interesting article about how to write your first Actionscript game available in the April 2009 Flash & Flex Developer Magazine. This magazine is apparently published in Eastern Europe but is entirely in English. It has a ton of material about Flash and Actionscript which, I consider pretty much the most complete development environment to create 2D games,

Here is a link to the website where you can download the magazine - all they ask is an email address before you download the magazine. Be forwarned, though - the magazine is entirely PDF (although text searachable) and it is a large file. I put it on a back-up drive.

Schools’ Tech Curriculum Called ‘Boring’

Got Schwartz? — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:21:25 GMT

That’s the headline of a Business Week article – but it’s something I’ve been talking about for, oh, three years now. The only good news is they’re helping spread word about the fact that 50% fewer kids are studying computer Read More......(read more)

Limbo of the Lost: Brilliant? Funny? Shameless? Lawsuit?

Got Schwartz? — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:57:38 GMT

This is worth a bunch of laughs and boggles. First, the game is a legit boxed release: Here’s the publisher page Here’s the Wikipedia Note the Wiki says they have “stopped distribution” while trying to sort out the controversy Read More......(read more)

Romans Used 20-Sided Dice Two Millennia Before D&D

Got Schwartz? — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:22:03 GMT

Annoyingly casual journalistic license, but amusing anyway. Why would a glass die with unidentified non-Roman numerals bought in Egypt in the 20s be called Roman? Romans Used 20-Sided Dice Two Millennia Before D&D Many of us geeks take great pride Read More......(read more)

Wii, WiiFit, Exercise and Physical Therapy

Got Schwartz? — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:58:57 GMT

Brilliant. Note the subtitle for my blog? Keep an eye out for the WiiFit. Hello, Sony? Hello, Microsoft? Where are yooouuuu? This is just the beginning: Nintendo Wii popular choice for therapists, children WICHITA FALLS, Texas — Jackson Peterson is running Read More......(read more)