On Libraries and New Media, powered by Library Journal and School Library Journal
The Westport Library’s ongoing efforts to support its Maker Space, including Maker in Residence programs and the recent acquisition of two programmable robots, have helped establish a virtuous cycle in which residents have begun working on their own projects and helping one another independently.
Computer coding programs and robotics are just some of the tools intrepid young patrons will be using this summer as school and public librarians nationwide gear up for technology camps.
Rebecca Forth doesn’t want kids to simply play Minecraft, she wants them to design their own worlds in the virtual building game. They can do just that and learn the necessary coding skills in a program set to launch at the Healdsburg branch of the Sonoma County (CA) Library in March 2014.
The best applications for teaching basic programming skills—no geek cred required to use them successfully in your classroom or library. Other apps enable kids to build 3-D models, which they can print, too.
A screencast tour of four free applications to help kids learn how to code: Daisy the Dinosaur, Hopscotch, Scratch, and Tynker.
In a rebuttal to Roy Tennant’s recent blog post, Paul Oh of the National Writing Project maintains “that knowing HTML—even just knowing how to find the HTML on a webpage or knowing just a few of the tags that comprise the language—makes us increasingly Web literate and gives us critical knowledge in relation to the most important writing production engine of our lifetime, the Internet.”
For newcomers, computer source code can look quite alien. Librarians might be reminded of the first time they saw a MARC record—a mishmash of recognizable words and bits of information embedded in funky punctuation. But it doesn’t have to be that way–learning code can help librarians customize and improve the usability of web-based resources and vendor interfaces and improve communication with a library’s IT staff and software vendors.
