The Museum is *not* getting rid of any of the hacks, and has in its collections even more than were ever on display at once. They are remodeling the exhibit space for an exhibition on the longer history of education at MIT: exhibition details are at
http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/in-the-works.html
Chocolate Pi
yay! we got LOGO in elementary school starting from fourth grade. don't remember much of it, except that it wasn't presented as programming; it was just "this is how you make pretty pictures" (or noises, or whatever). Lego-logo, on the other hand, was true programming, which never worked on the first try but eventually made little primary-colored dinosaurs totter around.
Living in a college dorm, I see all sorts of interactions between women and the net; from the girls who can't check their own email to those who use supercomputers to check it to those who write their own email programs. Sometime at the beginning of the year, my friend's roommate brought a girl back to their room who looked at my friend's computer (a work of art, caseless with all sorts of wires sticking out) and said, "eew, there's too much computer stuff in this room for girls." I was enraged and embarrased by her reaction, but it is a disgustingly common one. I had spent hours installing Linux on my computer in good part to show that I could; to provide an example that girls and computers are not mutually exclusive. Every time I need to do some programming work, though, I have to ask guys about it, because the other girls don't know; yesterday I had to show one of the compsci majors how to use TeX. this is probably just confused rambling, but I've got to go to class now.
Yes, yes, yes! _We_ by Zamyatin is the greatest scifi book I've read in years! Nodobdy else seems to have mentioned R.U.R before, which should definitely be on all the lists of classics. But _We_ - mmmm. I did a paper in highschool on early Soviet sf and fantasy, which included: _We_ by Zamiatin, _The Master and Margarita_ by Mihkail Bulgakov (minor sex, the allegorical/metaphorical/religous bits would confuse a kid), _The Mysterious (?) Eggs_, by Bulgakov and lots of short stories (only two major collections of this specific topic exist, and I can't remember the translator/editor (Myra Ginsburg, maybe). Look them up, both as historical/social documents and amazing sf.
One thing that always upset me as a child was reading SF without any female characters; all these colonies being founded supposedly without women, not even a cleaning lady or wife to go home to. Nobody every talked about the little green women from Mars. So, presumably your neice would be interested in at least a few books with strong female leads. I would definitely reccomend (although it's more fantasy) _So You Want to Be a Wizard_, by Diane Duane, nearly anything by Anne McCaffery or Mercedes Lackey (again more fantasy). For more strictly SF, try Vonda McIntyre or Joanna Russ.Some of the later Foundation books have female leads, as do various other Asimov books.
As a female college student in a dorm where people wander aimlessly in and out of each others's rooms, I find that the best way to get any coding project done is to leave it up on my monitor and wait for a critical mass of male compsci majors to come in and start arguing about it; it's the most time-consuming way, but it definitely provides enough options as one guy goes for elegance, another for obfuscation, another wants to write it all in another language...
I'm a first-year college student, and I've proudly called myself a geekgirl since the first time I heard the term used. What I seem to have noticed in general relationships, not even romantic ones, is that as long as I can be big-eyed and say "uhuh" to whatever someone deigns to give me advice on, and not let on that I've read the manual and the documentation, sometimes I'll get good answers to questions. But the minute they walk into my dorm room and see me happily coding away or [oh horrors] playing Quake, I become an intimidating presence. It's the old "She's smart for a woman, how'd she get that way" bit again. Yes, I am introverted, but the coolest guys I meet are too. The best conversations I've had since Orientation all began "FreeBSD or Linux?" or "What'd you think of Ender's Game?", never "Where're you from?" or "What's your major?" I don't think I'm that threatening, either as a girl/woman or as a geek, so smile and say hi! just my random thoughts...
Slashdot Mirror
The Museum is *not* getting rid of any of the hacks, and has in its collections even more than were ever on display at once. They are remodeling the exhibit space for an exhibition on the longer history of education at MIT: exhibition details are at http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/in-the-works .html
Chocolate Pi
yay! we got LOGO in elementary school starting from fourth grade. don't remember much of it, except that it wasn't presented as programming; it was just "this is how you make pretty pictures" (or noises, or whatever).
Lego-logo, on the other hand, was true programming, which never worked on the first try but eventually made little primary-colored dinosaurs totter around.
Living in a college dorm, I see all sorts of interactions between women and the net; from the girls who can't check their own email to those who use supercomputers to check it to those who write their own email programs.
Sometime at the beginning of the year, my friend's roommate brought a girl back to their room who looked at my friend's computer (a work of art, caseless with all sorts of wires sticking out) and said, "eew, there's too much computer stuff in this room for girls." I was enraged and embarrased by her reaction, but it is a disgustingly common one.
I had spent hours installing Linux on my computer in good part to show that I could; to provide an example that girls and computers are not mutually exclusive.
Every time I need to do some programming work, though, I have to ask guys about it, because the other girls don't know; yesterday I had to show one of the compsci majors how to use TeX.
this is probably just confused rambling, but I've got to go to class now.
Yes, yes, yes! _We_ by Zamyatin is the greatest scifi book I've read in years! Nodobdy else seems to have mentioned R.U.R before, which should definitely be on all the lists of classics. But _We_ - mmmm. I did a paper in highschool on early Soviet sf and fantasy, which included:
_We_ by Zamiatin,
_The Master and Margarita_ by Mihkail Bulgakov (minor sex, the allegorical/metaphorical/religous bits would confuse a kid),
_The Mysterious (?) Eggs_, by Bulgakov
and lots of short stories (only two major collections of this specific topic exist, and I can't remember the translator/editor (Myra Ginsburg, maybe). Look them up, both as historical/social documents and amazing sf.
One thing that always upset me as a child was reading SF without any female characters; all these colonies being founded supposedly without women, not even a cleaning lady or wife to go home to. Nobody every talked about the little green women from Mars. So, presumably your neice would be interested in at least a few books with strong female leads. I would definitely reccomend (although it's more fantasy) _So You Want to Be a Wizard_, by Diane Duane, nearly anything by Anne McCaffery or Mercedes Lackey (again more fantasy). For more strictly SF, try Vonda McIntyre or Joanna Russ.Some of the later Foundation books have female leads, as do various other Asimov books.
As a female college student in a dorm where people wander aimlessly in and out of each others's rooms, I find that the best way to get any coding project done is to leave it up on my monitor and wait for a critical mass of male compsci majors to come in and start arguing about it; it's the most time-consuming way, but it definitely provides enough options as one guy goes for elegance, another for obfuscation, another wants to write it all in another language ...
The dibble is rusty.
I'm a first-year college student, and I've proudly called myself a geekgirl since the first time I heard the term used. What I seem to have noticed in general relationships, not even romantic ones, is that as long as I can be big-eyed and say "uhuh" to whatever someone deigns to give me advice on, and not let on that I've read the manual and the documentation, sometimes I'll get good answers to questions. But the minute they walk into my dorm room and see me happily coding away or [oh horrors] playing Quake, I become an intimidating presence.
It's the old "She's smart for a woman, how'd she get that way" bit again.
Yes, I am introverted, but the coolest guys I meet are too. The best conversations I've had since Orientation all began "FreeBSD or Linux?" or "What'd you think of Ender's Game?", never "Where're you from?" or "What's your major?" I don't think I'm that threatening, either as a girl/woman or as a geek, so smile and say hi!
just my random thoughts...