Josh Wieder

A long time ago in a data center far, far away, the word "computer" was a job title. For a person. One of those people was Grace Hopper. Grace, h@xing on a sweet laptop in the 40's Grace worked her way up to Rear Admiral in the US Navy; no small feat for a woman of any time, but even more amazing as she started her career in the 30's with a PhD in math from Yale. In the Navy, she would go on to work on the Harvard Mark 1 (the first modern computer), and she headed the team that wrote the first compiler . Her contributions to computer science are immense. They are also largely glossed over by a science and an industry that is, let's face it, a bit of a sausage fest. It wasn't always that way. When computers were people, the industry was dominated by women, who tended to have better typing skills than men, and were cheaper to hire. Their contributions to the industry have been forgotten for decades, but thankfully there is a bit of a renaissance in unc...

Stanford created a strange, claymation character named Binky to teach students about the concept of Pointers in programming. Watch the video and share in the severe WTF-ness that comes along with it.

As time goes on, having a knowing how to write in a programming language is becoming less of an odd and obscurantist lifestyle choice and more of a necessity for gainful employment. Already, anyone wanting to pursue a career in the hard scientists will be finding themselves either developing or working with custom applications. But even entry-level and intern positions frequently have a "please help us with our website / CMS / database" component to them. The trouble is, people are terrified of code; even very smart people. It looks like ancient greek. For students of ancient greek it looks like Farsi. For Persian students of the Asiatic classics it looks like, err, English, probably. My point is that going from using the internet for Facebook and using the internet for push requests on Github has a very steep learning curve. So steep that most people fall right the hell off the curve. Enter Scratch . Scratch is an object oriented programming language developed by the Sma...