Results of the survey: Why don’t we have secondary school textbooks with source code in them?

As a person who has spent some years teaching children introductory programming, computational thinking and creativity, I have recently asked a simple question and published a very short survey: “Why don’t we have secondary school textbooks with source code in them?” I wanted to know what different people in different countries think and what their experiences were. I promised to publish the results after collecting a reasonable amount of data.

Results

So far 43 people have answered, and I think it is time to look at the data briefly. One of the questions was related to the past experience of people. I wanted to know whether they used textbooks with software source in their secondary education:

Apparently, out of 43 people who have answered, only 2 of them had the chance to have used such textbooks during their education. The questions that followed were “What was the subject of the book(s)?”, “What programming language was used  in the book?”, “What year was that?”, “Who was the author?”, and “Who is the publisher?”

 

How much Dutch do you know? Discover by playing a cool linguistic game

Apparently I didn’t think words such as gezwel, boombal, ejaculaat, reflatie, troela, and roro belonged to Dutch. That is, when I took a very interesting and simple test that asked to assess whether I thought the word on the screen is a valid Dutch word. You can try it out yourself simply by visiting http://woordentest.ugent.be and learn your score right after the test that you’ll complete in a few minutes. My result after the first take is 29%, in other words, I have recognized 76% of the words correctly, but unfortunately I have also claimed that 47% of the non-Dutch words to be Dutch. The interpration of the system is: “Dit is een behoorlijk niveau voor een Nederlandssprekende.” (This is a good level for a speaker of Dutch). My wife, a native speaker of Dutch, took the same test and her initial result was something close to 70%, and the system interpreted this as “possessing a very extensive vocabulary of Dutch”.

 

Lean Text Editing with Emacs: Kanban Applied to the Process of Text Editing

The reader of this blog entry’s title might be ready for a long article, but sometimes the best things in life are very short and simple. Such as this subtle question and discovery of an Emacs user: Why don’t we eliminate waste of time by simply automating the white-space insertion after comma and most of the other punctuation characters?

Why, indeed? I’ve never thought of it before, yet, without giving it a single thought I’ve tortured my SPACE key millions of times. The solution? Simpy apply the following recipe to your beloved Emacs text editor, thereby adapting it to the Agile, Lean, and Kanban world of text editing by eliminating waste:

 

Why don’t we have secondary school textbooks with source code in them?

One of the primary reasons I started programming was a textbook: When I was 12, back in 1988, we had a mathematics textbook that included short but self-contained programs. I and a few friends came together and tried out those programs. It made sense and was a lot of fun. We got into programming.

I don’t see such textbooks anymore. But I’m just one person with limited reach to many countries, their schools and books.

Why don’t you help us find out if there are such books, in any subject matter, that include short program source code samples at the end of their chapters?

Please fill in this short survey: “Where are the textbooks with source code?“; it will take less than 5 minutes, and the aggregated results will be published after a few hundred forms are filled in.

 

What happens when you don’t have enough science: talking about software development methodologies

Yusuf Arslan has recently asked an important question: Is Agile and Scrum really better than Waterfall? I think that’s a perfectly valid question and admit that he touched important aspects along the way. What piqued my curiosity was a particular section of his entry:

There are also serious allegations that promoting software development methods is just one big money-making exercise for a group of consultants. Certification has created a small army of consultants and trainers who are constantly busy training and coaching a bigger army of certified Scrum practitioners.

 

How to communicate the results of your research & innovation projects: a valuable guide from European Commission

Anyone who is involved with European projects, such as FP7 (7^th Framework Programme) projects, knows that a lot of documents are produced as deliverables. Those documents are mostly consumed internally, and even the public ones are generally written with more specialized users in mind. On the other hand, it is not difficult to see that communicating the results of a project to a wider audience in a successful manner is not achieved easily. This is a crucial step which, if done well, can provide the project partners with important benefits such as bringing new business opportunities, create a larger network, or increase the awareness about the project.

Dr. Frithjof Dau from SAP, the project leader of CUBIST, one of the FP7 projects that I’m involved with, has recently informed me that European Commission has published an important guide about disseminating the results of research and innovation projects: “Communicating EU Research & Innovation A guide for project participants“

Its description reads as:

 

Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

Writing a book on software project management methodologies is not something to be taken lightly. One runs the risk of not satisfying anyone while trying to cater to the wishes of everyone. Even though the title and cover pages are 100% buzzword compliant, which is a warning sign by itself, Henrik Kniberg seems to have achieved a satisfying result in his book ‘Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban‘.

The good parts

The book is short. In 150 pages you cannot go into details and start theoretizing, and this is good because Kniberg promises to do one thing well and he delivers it: A case study of a 60-person software development team who used a mixture of Kanban, Agile (Scrum) and XP methodologies.

His explanations are generally clear and his definitons are sharp enough for practical purposes. He does not preach and never takes a ‘here is the absolute truth, use it as it is’ approach. He tells his team’s story and does not hide the parts that are still evolving.