Coming from a culture where we associate news with accidents, violent crimes and disasters, I have came out and start to question our perverse obsession on negative news. Not all news agencies are created equal though. The Christian Science Monitor, for example, put a lot of focuses on education. Here is one good piece of story about an experiment in India where they put free computer stand in slums and found kids made good use of them. Surprising they found that with no supervision or instruction

the children "download and play audio and video, send and receive e-mail, chat, and so on," he says. They quickly move on to learn some English from English-language websites, read Indian newspapers, and even "look for jobs for their fathers,"

And it does not end there.

Many have changed their goals from say, rickshaw driver to engineer, and most now want to go to college.

Seeing this kind of heart warming notes really light up my day.

Thinking more about this, it is not all that surprising that kids can teach themselves about computer without any instructions. Afterall I learned much about computer and programming by myself before even set foot in the college, and all these without really spending much in gadgetry.

2006.06.01 [education, tech] - comments (0)

Nathan Torkington invite people to recount how they became hackers as an inpiration for new generations. I have taken this chance to write my own. It is reposted below.

How did I get into computer programming? I pride myself being a teen computer science theorist. Long before I've touched a real computer, I have already learned a whole lot of Basic programming by reading computer magazines in public library. My first program is really on a Casio programmable calculator. It has a macro function, a random number generator and a conditional branching command. With those I have build a Blackjack game. Later my friend got a Casio pocket computer PB-100. He generously lent me this new toy several days at a time. PB-100 has a great feature that it supports the spade, diamond, heart and club characters. So I got to build a number of card games using Basic.

Then my friend invited me to his home to use his Apple II. By then I have already learned everything about 6502 machine code. I decided my first program should be an assembler. I coded all the machine code on paper and brought it to my friend's home for a trial. After an entire afternoon of debugging it went no where. This became my first abandoned project. Eventually my parents gave in and bought me an Apple II. I have to confess that most of these came from the thriving pirate computer industry at that time. I got to read the pirated Apple reference manual translated into Chinese. It includes the source code of Woz' Basic ROM. That piece of software was really an enlightenment for me.

In time I moved up to Turbo Pascal, 300 baud modem and so on. I was steps ahead of other when I started CS in college.

2005.11.21 [education, computer] - comments (0)