I taught myself to program the Commodore 64 when I was 8 using the manual that came with it. My younger brother and I would spend hours making games and little demos in Basic. I didn't know at the time what a demo was though.
A few years later my dad got us a copy of Kids and the C=64 but the games in that didn't seem as fun as the ones we were making, which were more graphical.
Learning by making games is the way to go. Kids can learn some algebra concepts by learning the simple graphics libraries and learning to do simple animations.
A few years ago a 12 year old sent me an email and asked if I would help him make a video game. He had seen one of my others games on the web and wanted to learn. I thought it was cool that he dared to ask, so I took him up on it. We decided to code in Java since it is freely available and you can put your work up on a website for others to see. The result is at http://www.angelfire.com/games4/anirak/. I did most of the programming and he did the design of the game and the graphics. We went over the code using instant messenger he understood it and would modify it to try out different things. It was a lot of fun for him.
After that I started writing a pacman type tutorial on the same site, but only recently have I made any progress on it. Unfortunately the stuff I have done recently is pretty complex. It is probably easier to stick to shot-em-ups that don't involve complex boards or AI when using the game as a learning tool for children.
If you want to use any of the code on those sites for educational purposes feel free to do so.
I agree that the banner ads suck. I might be tempted to move my stuff, but the 400kB file limit seems like a pretty large restriction. I have some concerns when I see things like this.
If I were more serious about this stuff I might dump the free sites completely and pay for something decent.
Download the winamp pluggin from my original post. That way you can see the effect in motion. Then put in "Dark Side of the Moon". It is better on the green monitor, but a still photo is worse than the winamp pluggin.
I was unable to make any significant progress in Ultima IV because I had a pirated copy and no documentation. I had no idea what ingredients I needed to cast spells, which really limited my party.
If I had had $49 when I was 12 to spend on it I would have, just to get the map and the spell book.
I am sure that the results aren't a simple numeric score. It would have to come back with a list of passages that were copied and where they were copied from.
This is interesting to me in that I am writing a version of PacMan with random mazes. The challenge is to make the mazes have attributes similar to PacMan but randomly generated so you never play the same game twice. I have a demo up at the webpage in my sig. I have actually made more progress (no dead ends, better ghost AI), but haven't posted those yet. Note that the ghost can't kill you.
You probably wouldn't do it all in one trip like the Apollo program. First end a large orbiter with enough fuel to return to Earth orbit, and leave it there orbiting. You could then send an unmanned lander that had enough fuel to reach Mars orbit, or even find a way to have it chugging away on the surface making fuel for itself. Once everything is in place you could send the humans in a craft that will only go one way, knowing that what they need to return with is already there.
Then humans land, do their thing for a while (two years?) and get in the launch vehicle and go up to the orbiter. Then they ditch the launch vehicle and rocket back to Earth, the Moon, or a space station in Earth orbit.
All of this assumes that the little green men don't eat them first and that the ship's computer doesn't decide to lock them out one day in order to carry out the secret mission.
The iMac has many of the same concerns as a laptop. It is hard to fix yourself and is a very custom design. If I bought one I'd probably get AppleCare too.
I can certainly understand your point of view. However, getting a desktop fixed is much less expensive than a laptop. Laptops see a lot more abuse than your typical tower system. They are more likely to fail in interesting ways, such as some part of the case cracking.
Also, many/. readers are probably comfortable fixing their own desktop.
George should provide an outline of what he wants to happen and then let others take over to write and direct.
Not only that, but he should cut down on the bluescreen stuff and get back to having actors actually film sceens together as opposed to piecing it together digitally afterwards.
Finally, he should get rid of references to american pop culture. No cheesy race announcers bantering back and forth and no robotic football games happening in the background. Oh, and Dean Kamen wants his Segway back, since most of the 'droids in Ep2 resemble it in someway.
Perceived saftey and actual safety are two different things. You feel safe in a big tall, heavy vehicle.
Re:% of people who upgrade?
on
Upgrade Your eMac
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think you are misstating the cause and effect here. People don't buy SUVs rather than station wagons because of CAFE. The average consumer is unaware of CAFE. Automakers push SUVs because of CAFE. SUVs are less expensive than a car of similar size because of CAFE.
People do buy SUVs because they like the sense of power, and it is nice to sit up higher and be able to have a clearer picture of the road. The 4WD is nice in a pinch too.
This is probably going to come off as annoying and tooting my own horn. That is not the point of it. It is to explain my own experience and say why skipping grades isn't the solution. It doesn't have much to do with ADHD, though I see some symptoms of that in myself at at times. If this comment annoys you, then skip it.
Skipping grades in school is not a solution. That just leads to the student becoming a misfit. You'll still be smarter than everyone, but you won't be as advanced socially, and you'll be smaller. What a deal! Even if you are on, say a 5th grade level while in the 3rd grade, do you think you wouldn't be bored to death sitting in a 5th grade class, going AT THE SAME PACE you were in 3rd grade?
The only times that I was happy in school were the times when I was with peers that we also advanced. When I was in 5th and 6th grade we had a collector program that took the more advanced kids from each school in the district and had them all go to the same class. This was incredible. For the first time I wasn't annoying the teacher by being too far ahead. Also, we covered material at a pace that could maintain everyone's interest.
Then junior high came with an odd mix of taking classes with people two years older than you, "honors" classes, and normal classes. Let me tell you how much fun it is to sit in a math class as a 7th grader and have the 9th grader sitting behind you threaten you for answers. Plus we weren't moving at a pace that was fast enough for me. I could do the assingments before we were done with class. I never felt like I was being pushed or stretched in junior high or high school. I could keep up (and even excel) with minimal effort.
Public schools do not want to challenge their students. They want to serve as many students as they can as efficiently as possible. This works ok for most students, though they could probably stand to be challenged more than they are, but it works poorly for those at the extremes. The problem is that schools will have all sorts of programs for remedial students but don't seem to put the same sort of effort into programs for those that are advanced. As an example, my high school ran out of math classes for me and several other students. There was nothing for me to take my senior year. I went from taking many classes with people two years older than me to taking them with people in the same grade, and basically ran out. I was bored out of my mind my senior year, though it was nice socially to be with people my age.
After 5th and 6th grade, the only time that I felt like I belonged socially and intellectually during my schooling was at Stanford. There I was simply normal. Classes were often challenging and required work. I wasn't racing ahead of my peers and wasn't viewed as an oddity. It was a wonderful experience. I wish I could have experienced more of that before my university studies.
Skipping grades makes you an oddity. Who wants to be the freak? Raise your hand. There are plenty of smart kids in public schools, they are just isolated. Programs that bring them together and challenge them are possible, but for the most part administrators are too worried about other things to care.
I have an Apple III monitor, built in 1983 that I have rewired to use as a analog visualization device on my home stereo. Don't try this at home! I have had a monitor of a different brand start smoking after doing this. I basically cut the wires leading to the coils at the back of the CRT tube so that they no longer get a signal from the board. Then I routed the stereo wires through them, left for horizontal and right for vertical. It makes fancy green images on my screen.
I have also written a little WinAmp pluggin to demo the effect, since you can't download my old monitor. It is here.
Go into the Preferences panel, select Plug-ins, then Visualization. Select the vis_text.dll pluggin and then in the drop-down box at the bottom select Strange.
Remember the hydrogen infrastructure announcement a while back? That within 10 years we'd have a hydrogen based economy? Seen any progress towards that?
Maybe the submitter should try reading the article. The article makes it very clear that Adobe didn't write the conterfeit dection software. It came from the "Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group, an organization established by the governors of the G-10 central banks to promote the use of anti-counterfeit devices in the computer industry."
Adobe doesn't even know how it works (it is a black box), not to mention having wasted any effort on it.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years later my dad got us a copy of Kids and the C=64 but the games in that didn't seem as fun as the ones we were making, which were more graphical.
Learning by making games is the way to go. Kids can learn some algebra concepts by learning the simple graphics libraries and learning to do simple animations.
A few years ago a 12 year old sent me an email and asked if I would help him make a video game. He had seen one of my others games on the web and wanted to learn. I thought it was cool that he dared to ask, so I took him up on it. We decided to code in Java since it is freely available and you can put your work up on a website for others to see. The result is at http://www.angelfire.com/games4/anirak/. I did most of the programming and he did the design of the game and the graphics. We went over the code using instant messenger he understood it and would modify it to try out different things. It was a lot of fun for him.
After that I started writing a pacman type tutorial on the same site, but only recently have I made any progress on it. Unfortunately the stuff I have done recently is pretty complex. It is probably easier to stick to shot-em-ups that don't involve complex boards or AI when using the game as a learning tool for children.
If you want to use any of the code on those sites for educational purposes feel free to do so.
at the Hatch family reunion!
Until recently, war just wasn't that fun.
It is probably easier to send a robot that will gather samples and then return with them.
Check out http://www.pcwebshopper.com/mp3.html and http://store.yahoo.net/s168/mp3playernew.html for a small, cheap mp3 player. I have one and it works great. No display though.
If I were more serious about this stuff I might dump the free sites completely and pay for something decent.
Download the winamp pluggin from my original post. That way you can see the effect in motion. Then put in "Dark Side of the Moon". It is better on the green monitor, but a still photo is worse than the winamp pluggin.
If I had had $49 when I was 12 to spend on it I would have, just to get the map and the spell book.
I am sure that the results aren't a simple numeric score. It would have to come back with a list of passages that were copied and where they were copied from.
Of course a screenshot isn't possible, since no computer is used.
This is interesting to me in that I am writing a version of PacMan with random mazes. The challenge is to make the mazes have attributes similar to PacMan but randomly generated so you never play the same game twice. I have a demo up at the webpage in my sig. I have actually made more progress (no dead ends, better ghost AI), but haven't posted those yet. Note that the ghost can't kill you.
Then humans land, do their thing for a while (two years?) and get in the launch vehicle and go up to the orbiter. Then they ditch the launch vehicle and rocket back to Earth, the Moon, or a space station in Earth orbit.
All of this assumes that the little green men don't eat them first and that the ship's computer doesn't decide to lock them out one day in order to carry out the secret mission.
The iMac has many of the same concerns as a laptop. It is hard to fix yourself and is a very custom design. If I bought one I'd probably get AppleCare too.
Here is a review of the most recently released Foveon X3 based camera. It is an interesting alternative to CCDs.
Also, many /. readers are probably comfortable fixing their own desktop.
This goes for any brand of laptop out there, not just Apple.
Not only that, but he should cut down on the bluescreen stuff and get back to having actors actually film sceens together as opposed to piecing it together digitally afterwards.
Finally, he should get rid of references to american pop culture. No cheesy race announcers bantering back and forth and no robotic football games happening in the background. Oh, and Dean Kamen wants his Segway back, since most of the 'droids in Ep2 resemble it in someway.
Perceived saftey and actual safety are two different things. You feel safe in a big tall, heavy vehicle.
People do buy SUVs because they like the sense of power, and it is nice to sit up higher and be able to have a clearer picture of the road. The 4WD is nice in a pinch too.
Skipping grades in school is not a solution. That just leads to the student becoming a misfit. You'll still be smarter than everyone, but you won't be as advanced socially, and you'll be smaller. What a deal! Even if you are on, say a 5th grade level while in the 3rd grade, do you think you wouldn't be bored to death sitting in a 5th grade class, going AT THE SAME PACE you were in 3rd grade?
The only times that I was happy in school were the times when I was with peers that we also advanced. When I was in 5th and 6th grade we had a collector program that took the more advanced kids from each school in the district and had them all go to the same class. This was incredible. For the first time I wasn't annoying the teacher by being too far ahead. Also, we covered material at a pace that could maintain everyone's interest.
Then junior high came with an odd mix of taking classes with people two years older than you, "honors" classes, and normal classes. Let me tell you how much fun it is to sit in a math class as a 7th grader and have the 9th grader sitting behind you threaten you for answers. Plus we weren't moving at a pace that was fast enough for me. I could do the assingments before we were done with class. I never felt like I was being pushed or stretched in junior high or high school. I could keep up (and even excel) with minimal effort.
Public schools do not want to challenge their students. They want to serve as many students as they can as efficiently as possible. This works ok for most students, though they could probably stand to be challenged more than they are, but it works poorly for those at the extremes. The problem is that schools will have all sorts of programs for remedial students but don't seem to put the same sort of effort into programs for those that are advanced. As an example, my high school ran out of math classes for me and several other students. There was nothing for me to take my senior year. I went from taking many classes with people two years older than me to taking them with people in the same grade, and basically ran out. I was bored out of my mind my senior year, though it was nice socially to be with people my age.
After 5th and 6th grade, the only time that I felt like I belonged socially and intellectually during my schooling was at Stanford. There I was simply normal. Classes were often challenging and required work. I wasn't racing ahead of my peers and wasn't viewed as an oddity. It was a wonderful experience. I wish I could have experienced more of that before my university studies.
Skipping grades makes you an oddity. Who wants to be the freak? Raise your hand. There are plenty of smart kids in public schools, they are just isolated. Programs that bring them together and challenge them are possible, but for the most part administrators are too worried about other things to care.
I have also written a little WinAmp pluggin to demo the effect, since you can't download my old monitor. It is here. Go into the Preferences panel, select Plug-ins, then Visualization. Select the vis_text.dll pluggin and then in the drop-down box at the bottom select Strange.
Remember the hydrogen infrastructure announcement a while back? That within 10 years we'd have a hydrogen based economy? Seen any progress towards that?
Given that I work on smart cards for a living, I would have to agree with that. :)
Adobe doesn't even know how it works (it is a black box), not to mention having wasted any effort on it.
and I agree 5738%!