December 2016 News Wire

Interesting stories about computer science, software programming, and technology for December 2016.

How NASA Got Every Last Piece of Pluto Data Down From New Horizons

https://www.wired.com/2016/10/15-months-new-horizons-finally-transmitted-6-25-gigs-pluto-data

How Zero Was Invented

http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/can-nothing-be-something-the-history-of-zero

One Man Helped Connect 60,000 People in Nepal to the Internet. How Did He Do It?

http://bigthink.com/natalie-shoemaker/one-man-helped-connect-60000-people-in-nepal-to-the-internet

3D Printed Car Parts are Now a Thing

http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/10/cheaper-faster-lighter-3d-printed-car-parts-are-now-a-thing/

The BBC micro:bit Available Globally

http://microbit.org/news/2016/10/18/news-microbit-foundation.html

How Quantum Programing Turned into a 3-D Puzzle Game

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602590/how-quantum-programing-turned-into-a-3-d-puzzle-game/
https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.06628
http://www.mequanics.com.au/

Microsoft releases open source toolkit used to build human-level speech recognition

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/microsoft-releases-open-source-toolkit-used-to-build-human-level-speech-recognition/

Author

  • Tim Slavin

    Tim is an award-winning writer and technologist who enjoys teaching tech to non-technical people. He has many years experience with web sites and applications in business, technical, and creative roles. He and his wife have two kids, now teenagers, who are mad about video games.

Also In The December 2016 Issue

Hour of Code and EU Code Week are events designed to introduce kids, young adults, and others to programming and computer science.

Real life treasure hunts are a way to get outdoors, learn map skills, and have fun finding hidden caches near you.

A trainable puppy plus treats plus technology equals a dog that can send selfies. Here's how.

An app to help kids remember important stuff like feed your pets, brush your teeth, and smile.

These books include lots of great projects to work on by yourself or with others, from Scratch and Minecraft to fun maker space projects.

The mBot robotics kit is an excellent comparatively low-cost way to begin working with robots.

There are maybe a bazillion Raspberry Pi projects online. Here are really fun projects plus links to find more.

The Wayback Machine lets you travel back in time to see old websites. Plus the Internet Archive has thousands of vintage games, software, books, and more.

Eating dog food doesn't sound like much fun but it's an important part of creating software.

The ability to identify patterns, decompose large problems into small parts, develop algorithms to solve problems, and generalize to find solutions.

To celebrate this wonderful time of the year, let’s create some holiday music using Sonic Pi on our Raspberry Pi.

This project shows how to use the pygame code library to move simple animations with the Python programming language.

This project, shows you how to create your own random password generator in the C# programming language.

These projects mix science and technology in interesting ways. Sewing and electronics, for example, is a different way to learn about electronics.

Links from the bottom of all the December 2016 articles, collected in one place for you to print, share, or bookmark.

Interesting stories about computer science, software programming, and technology for December 2016.

What sounds like a country western dance actually is an efficient way to sort large sets of data randomly.

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