I wrote this for Wired:
By day, Bueno is a Facebook engineer. He helps hone software on the servers underpinning the world’s largest social network. But he moonlights as a children’s author. His first book is called Lauren Ipsum, and it’s a fairy tale that seeks to introduce children — as young as five or as old as 12 — to the concepts of computer science.
But this isn’t done with code. It’s done with metaphors. In one scene, the titular character, Laurie Ipsum, teaches a mechanical turtle to draw a perfect circle using simple instructions in the form of a poem. “I wanted to write a book not on how to program, but how to think like a programmer,” Bueno tells Wired.
Full Story: Wired Enterprise: Facebook Engineer Turns 5-Year-Olds Into Hackers
See Also
My ReadWriteWeb interview with Douglas Rushkoff on why you should learn to program.
Digital Cut-Ups: Teaching Creative Writing with Programming.
My interview with mathpunk Tom Henderson on innumeracy and more.
From http://technoccult.net/archives/2012/05/23/author-teaches-kids-to-code-without-computers/
Here’s a short piece I wrote for ReadWriteWeb about a course at ITP:
So how exactly is Python programming useful in creative writing? Parrish’s course doesn’t deal with artificial intelligence, or attempts at creating narratives or creating interactive hypertext or anything like that. It covers, for lack of a better term, procedural poetry. Typically, a student takes a starting set of text, writes a Python program to modify that text and then interprets the results.
Parrish cited non-electronic procedural poetry experiments as inspirations for the course. For example, he talked about Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a book in which the text has been cut into strips that can be re-arranged to create nearly endless configurations:
Parrish also mentioned Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets and David Melnick’s PCOET. Parrish didn’t mention them in his talk, but the course website also mentions Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs’ work with the cut-up technique.
ReadWriteWeb: Teaching Creative Writing with Programming
See also:
My interview with Douglas Rushkoff on why YOU should learn to program
William S. Burroughs’s computer artworks – “Cybernetic Cut-ups”
From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/PzYv2WJS7Nw/
