News Wire Stories for August 2013
Image by ell brown on Flickr
3D game design tech, a guitar that does email, what wi-fi would look like if we could see it, golf ball technology, women in tech, and other stories from the past month or so from around the internet.
Crowdsourcing a Time Machine to Revisit Climate Past
Help create a database with climate data from maritime logs dating back to the 1800s. This could be a great project for teachers to introduce their students to data projects. And for people interested to help out.
http://www.adventure-journal.com/2013/07/crowdsourcing-a-time-machine-to-revisit-climate-past/
This Is What Wi-Fi Would Look Like, If We Could See It
Artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm wanted to know: what would Wi-Fi look like if we could see those waves pulsing the network to our computers?
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1682662/this-is-what-wi-fi-would-look-like-if-we-could-see-it#1
Say Goodbye to the Tech Sounds You'll Never Hear Again
Sadly, you can date yourself by whether or not you’ve heard some of these sounds, like modems or blowing on a Nintendo cartridge or using a payphone.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/07/tech-sounds/?viewall=true
AgentCubes-in-a-Box: Introduce Computing Through Game Design
Downloadable NCWIT curriculum, helps teachers bring 3D game design to their K-12 STEM students. AgentCubes is a programming environment for 3D video games and simulations. As part of the Scalable Game Design research, AgentCubes technology has been evaluated and tested by educators at the University of Colorado with over 10,000 K-12 students.
http://www.ncwit.org/resources/agentcubes-box-introduce-computing-through-game-design
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2GWcb3aG2w0
The Guitar That Can Type An Email Makes Email Interesting Again
http://www.bitrebels.com/technology/the-guitar-that-can-type-an-email/
These Stunning Maps were made Entirely from Geotagged Tweets
Wonderfully delicate spider maps from around the world. Comments are fun to read, too.
http://io9.com/these-stunning-maps-were-made-entirely-from-geotagged-t-511188445
Tech May Be Whistled Language’s Demise
http://news.discovery.com/human/life/whistled-language-130405.htm
A Rare Peek At The Guidelines That Dictate Google's Graphic Design
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672777/a-rare-peek-at-the-guidelines-that-dictate-googles-graphic-design#1
http://www.behance.net/gallery/Google-Visual-Assets-Guidelines-Part-1/9028077
http://www.behance.net/gallery/Google-Visual-Assets-Guidelines-Part-2/9084309
WhiteHat Finds Website Security Has Drastically Improved
http://www.pcworld.com/article/258545/whitehat_finds_website_security_has_drastically_improved.html
Happy Birthday, Baby"”The 65th Anniversary of Computer Software
One of the joys of travel overseas is discovering other countries discovered technologies way before any other country, including yours. In this case, apparently Baby (aka the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine) pre-dated anything us Yanks came up with.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/happy-birthday-baby-the-65th-anniversary-of-computer-software/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Small-Scale_Experimental_Machine
There Are Plenty of Women in Tech, You Just Haven’t Noticed
Matches my experiences in Corporate America: lots of women contribute in tech roles. There could (and should) be more, of course. I hear there’s to be a follow up article highlighting women in technology.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2422200,00.asp
Cross Section Photos of Golf Balls Reveal the Diverse Beauty Within
How to design and build the perfect golf ball is a technology problem, and often uses computers.
http://petapixel.com/2013/07/18/cross-section-photos-of-golf-balls-reveal-the-diverse-beauty-within/
Author
Also In The August 2013 Issue
Hello World! in 100 Programming Languages
When you learn a new programming language, one of the first programs you learn is how to code, "Hello World!" Here's the phrase in four programming languages, as well as links to 100 plus examples.
Online Guidelines for Student Blogging, Commenting, and Personal Safety
These guidelines are collected from the internet, with links for more ideas to help teachers and students.
An Interview with Patrice Gans
A university trained programmer, with a masters in computer science and a full professional career, Patrice teaches technology and computer science to kids in kindergarten through eighth grade.
Codea, Hopscotch, Tynker
These three applications make it fairly easy to learn basic software programming concepts, from block building (Hopscotch and Tynker) to the more sophisticated (but easy to understand) approach for the Codea iPad application.
How to Choose Your First Programming Language
There are so many programming languages, how do you choose one? Here are 18 options for all ages.
Owls and Super Bugs
Here are two programmers who use their coding skills to solve complex problems, from tracking endangered owls in Yosemite to tracking and isolating a deadly virus in a hospital isolation ward.
Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty.
Learn More Links for August 2013
Links from the bottom of all the August 2013 articles, collected in one place for you to print, share, or bookmark.
Website Design Patterns
In the software world, patterns provide a useful way to critique, discuss, and build screens to help people do things online.
News Wire Stories for August 2013
3D game design tech, a guitar that does email, what wi-fi would look like if we could see it, golf ball technology, women in tech, and other stories from the past month or so from around the internet.
HTML Coding for Beginners
Creating content in an online publishing tool often requires zero knowledge of HTML. When hand coded HTML is required, however, you only need to know five tags. Seriously.
How to Teach WordPress Basics to Students
It's easy to teach students how to create and publish content with WordPress because the software rewards clicking links to find what you need to do.
Tools to Create and Develop Software
These tools make it easy to create and develop software with the ability to validate code, connect to web servers, store code snippets, and other useful features.
PHP
From a simple website activity application written in the C language in 1994, the PHP programming language has evolved into a robust language optimized for web servers and web applications.
