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Watch: President Obama Learns to Code

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Reality Based Steve12/08/2014 5:28:00 pm PST

One of my co-workers (She’s over on the dark side, sales), her little boy is learning programming from the MIT Scratch program. It’s a lot like their “App Inventor” product, you don’t write code, you take blocks, they hook together, and it generates the code.

He’s learning about loops, variables, decision trees, all the programming essentials, but learning just the concepts and seeing how they work making actual apps.

After that, think how easy it would be to actually learn code, once you know what a loop is, why it works, what you use it for. I think this is such an exciting idea.

And yes, I know that there have been tools like this for years, but the focus of this is so perfect.

And in related news, I officially gave my company my 2 week notice. Don’t have a lily pad to land on, but I’ve got more than enough resources to see me for far more than the immediate future, a safety net for after that, and several people who have openly said they would like to see me work for them. (We’ll see where that pans out now that it’s for real :) ) I suspect that they won’t pull me out of this weeks class, but I bet they will find somebody to cover next weeks. They don’t like people with ‘nothing to lose’ teaching. (and that’s part of their problem)

I think I’m going to take a bit of a sabbatical first, let myself unwind. Going to Florida in 2 weeks to spend Christmas with my Dad, and then see what I want to do next. Maybe some coding job, maybe implementation / installation, maybe become a male stripper. Last one probably isn’t the best plan.

RBS