Think Quest New York City (TQNYC) is an after-school program where children from middle schools work in small teams to build educational web sites. The program is brilliant and combines so many things I'm passionate about: children, learning, creativity, problem-solving, DIY, technology.
Students have submitted some pretty spectacular entries. I just completed round one of judging and will be judging the second round of semi-finalists next week. I've been asked to the gala ceremony which I plan to attend. I'd love to meet these up-and-comers. School was a lot different for me as a kid.
(Cue violins in the background.)
When I was their age, there were no school programs like this, nothing to incentivize kids to embrace technology. There was no internet. I couldn't Google for homework help. And certainly, there was no Dreamweaver. In school, I learned PL/C which we programmed with card stacks that were fed through mainframe computers. I literally had to pencil in binary code (who on earth designed that?) on these scantron-like cards. One careless reshuffling of your card stack and ... that's it -- your program was ruined! Nothing is more frustrating than spending several class hours coding card stacks for a simple program involving if/then/else clauses and loops to solve something that you could have easily done in your head in a matter of seconds.
My sister and I somehow convinced our parents that a Commodore 64 was a good educational investment. It was how I first learned to love to program. I quickly learned how to build games (after all, that was the ulterior motive behind prodding my parents for the Commodore!) So, in some strange way, I guess it was a good educational investment after all.