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Ivanka Trump To Take Coding Class With 5-Year-Old Daughter (hollywoodlife.com)
theodp writes: Speaking about women in STEM at a Women's History Month event at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, new [unpaid] federal employee Ivanka Trump revealed she'll be taking a computer coding class with her 5-year-old daughter. "On a very personal level, as a mom I'm trying to do my part as well," Ivanka told the crowd. "My daughter Arabella and I are enrolling in a coding class this summer." Parroting supermodel Karlie Kloss (the girlfriend of Ivanka's brother-in-law), the first daughter added, "We're excited to learn this incredibly important new language together. Coding truly is the language of the future."
Talking about the daugther, of course.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Why are so many of you bashing her for this? She's doing something with her daughter, and it has nothing to do with you, or this country.
This particular news was made public through US Secretary DeVos.
How can you possibly claim this does not have anything to do with "this country"?
Even ignoring that she is de-facto an advisor for the president with an office in the white house, security clearance and everything.
Even ignoring that she is acting as first lady in lue of the actual Mrs. Trump.
I want you to honestly ask yourselvesif this was Michelle Obama doing this, would you be bashing her for it?
Would republicans? Yes.
Would democrats? Yes, as it would be equally much a publicity stunt.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Put aside your cynicism for a moment. It's hard, I get that, but just for a moment....
OK, ready?
None of these coding initiatives are about teaching someone to code. It's about exposure. Think of football (or hockey, or ...) camp for 8 year olds. Very few of those kids are going on to a brilliant professional sporting career. So we should shut them down, treat any parent who enrolls their child in such a camp with derision, etc. Right? No? Why not?
Because sometimes the experience is more important then the result.
When I was 5, I got a chance to play with a Vic 20. My landlords' daughter showed me how to do the classic:
10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 GOTO 10
I remember feeling the world change. It was a different place then before I wrote and ran that program. I *GOT* it. I knew this beige box was going to change everything.
Years later, when I was about 8, the local Commodore club got a modem. I saw what it did and felt that feeling again. I pestered my mom to let me check it out from the hardware library for months before she agreed and I dialed into a local Radio Shack BBS. The sysop started a chat and we talked in chat. This was the future.
In the years since, I ran a Fidonet network hub, ran two freenets in two cities, was the sole technical employee for a regional ISP in northern Canada, and have endeavored to make the world a slightly better place. To build the future I glimpsed when I was 5.
You know what? Never became a programmer. I can barely program my way out of a wet paper bag to this day. I know the concepts and understand how to use those concepts in my professional life, but programming itself has never set my soul alight. Does that make the experience of the journey any less important? Does it mean that the 5 year old wasted his time?
I'd argue no. I have no idea how my life might have changed if not for that chance encounter when I was 5. Maybe I'd still have followed the same life path. But for some of those kids getting exposed with the learn to code movement, statistically speaking, it will change their lives.
For me, that's enough. My daughter went to Defcon (the hacker conference) when she was 3, so hopefully she got 2 years on me in feeling that wonder.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
You are so full shit shit. Hillary / Mrs. Obama pulled MUCH WORSE publicity stunts that tried to tackle controversial issues and got praised for it in the media. Then you have this "stunt" which is not controversial and should be praised by everyone, especially liberals who think women are are some sort of disadvantage in STEM, and she gets attacked for it. Do you understand the fucking irony? The very people who push for this type of shit day and night are attacking her.
It is almost as if Liberals WANT the pain and suffering of being incompetent so they can complain and get more votes and entitlements. Heaven forbid a woman role model tried to SOLVE SOMETHING by showing women they can learn something new and "uncomfortable" at the same time as teaching their kids. No we need Hillary, the corrupt fuck who wipes a server "what, like with a cloth". Yeah, that is the fucking role model we need. Hillary talks about solving problems but does nothing - and even worse - attack women when armies of lawyers.
So... Fuck you. People like you are the reason this nation sucks.
Hang on Mr Coward, which one of Trump's baby-mommas are you talking about? And yes, what's going on right now in the Whitehouse is a horror show. It's an orange man-baby throwing tantrums and doing everything he can to fuck over the rubes he conned into voting for him, and what's worse is that some of the people around him are actually taking him seriously. I can't imagine anything more crooked - he's openly gloating about destroying the environment, destroying public education, taking bribes, blatant nepotism, filling his cabinet with people who are donors, including most who have no idea how to run their departments (or worse, are actively hostile toward them). There's also now a mountain of evidence he worked with Russia during the election (although with Nunes on the payroll, I'm sure a bit of money will make that "go away").
The only good thing about Trump is that he's old and he'll be dead soon. If you voted for him, you helped sell out America.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
THIS.....IS.....SLASHDOT, you should have written one that actually works!
#/bin/python3
daddy_paying_will = input("Is Daddy paying me or has me in the will? Enter Yes or No.\n")
if daddy_paying_will == "Yes":
print("LIES\nALTERNATIVE FACTS\nFAKE NEWS\nSO SAD\n")
else:
print("I'm Fucked.")
Took me a few minutes to come up with that, and I know very little about programming. Hmm, since these hour of code things are mostly turtle graphics I wonder if I could do it with python's turtle graphics module....back to vim....
#/bin/python3
import turtle
turtle.shape("turtle")
daddy_paying_will = turtle.textinput("Answer Question", "Is Daddy paying me or has me in the will? Enter Yes or No.\n")
if daddy_paying_will == "Yes":
turtle.write("LIES\nALTERNATIVE FACTS\nFAKE NEWS\nSO SAD\n\nClick window to exit.", align="center", font=("Comic Sans MS", 32,))
turtle.exitonclick()
else:
turtle.write("I'm Fucked\n\nClick window to exit.", align="center", font=("Comic Sans MS", 32,))
turtle.exitonclick()
That took me a bit longer, had to figure out how to prompt for input IN the turtle window. turtle.textinput is Python3 only. I leave it as an excercise for the reader to figure out how to change the default turtle to an image of Trump himself.