I've been a fan of Nikoli puzzles since discovering them through the US Puzzle Championship exam years ago. I always wanted more practice but had a hard time finding paper puzzle books to work with. Especially if I didn't want a book with Sudoku. Anyhow, just a few months ago, I discovered two puzzles books at Barnes and Noble!
I've recently come across Latin as I was reading "The Well-Trained Mind" by Susan Wise Bauer. It's a book describing how to provide a "classical education" to kids at home. (I'm homeschooling my two young kids this year and reading everything I can about how to homeschool.)
The author strongly recommends having the kids learn Latin. In case anyone is interested, some resources/curricula for homeschooling Latin she mentions in the book include Prima Latina, Latina Christiana, Song School Latin, Latin for Children, The Big Book of Lively Latin, The Latin Road to English Grammar, and Latin Alive!.
Anyone have experience/thoughts/opinions on teaching their kids Latin? Or even learning Latin as a kid?
This year's FIRST Robotics Lego League Jr's theme is building a moon base. This article is likely too dense for the 6-10 year old crowd but can offer the coach/mentor some discussion ideas!
For me, each play-through has taken hours but after finally playing it correctly (first two times I played I misinterpreted some crucial rules), I enjoyed the game quite a bit.
I've been compiling Scratch books and here are my (and my kids') favorites:
- Coding for beginners using Scratch (Usborne)
- Code Your Own Games!: 20 Games to Create with Scratch by Max Wainewright
- Super Scratch Programming Adventure! by The LEAD Project
- Coding Projects in Scratch by Jon Woodcock
- Scratch Programming Playground by Al Sweigart
The list above is roughly in order of difficulty. The first two books have spiral binding so they sit flat on the table. I found this to be immensely helpful when my kids first started to use the computer / do Scratch. They could focus on using the mouse and tap-tap-tap typing on the keyboard without losing the page.
The screws and screwdriver make it super easy to connect the cardboard together, and I've found the fit to be surprisingly sturdy. It's reusable and pretty quick to remove from the cardboard once you're ready to take everything down.
The saw, in my opinion, doesn't cut that well. Possibly still better than having the kids use large scissors or a box cutter though.
I would argue that "few people are capable of so on their own at that age" because they were never given the opportunity to learn and practice self-discipline at an earlier age. After all, the typical American schooling experience allows very little room for deviation from the same thing everyone else is doing.
If you started to self-direct at 13 (or earlier), you'd probably be pretty self-disciplined at 18.
I agree with the sentiment that college is not the only choice after high school and may not be the best place to cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit. However, I was surprised that after all the words used to describe how school was lacking in this particular direction, taking the kids out of school was not considered.
As some of the other commenters are suggesting, it may be too much of a jump to offer such a choice to the child at 18 if the child was not preparing for such an opportunity.
Homeschooling has its own critics and supporters and we don't need to get into that here. But my question is this: If he's going to trust his child to make a choice at 18, why not even earlier? How about 14? Or, in other words, why not have their education focus on learning how to make their own decisions as early as possible? And if school doesn't provide this for his children, should they be there?
Granted, the author doesn't outline what he plans on doing between now and the end of high school for his kids so maybe he is, in fact, preparing them for this decision. I just think that the decision would be too drastic to spring on an 18 year old who has had no preparation for it.
My company was LaunchBit https://www.launchbit.com/, which was acquired by BuySellAds. We helped people buy/sell advertising space in newsletters. After a while, newsletters were getting hard to find so we also created a newsletter directory. http://www.newsletterdirectory.co/
It's been several years now and I haven't kept up with how they are both being maintained. Anyway, you may find it helpful.
Is that a negative? Seems like if you're the candidate and you don't work out after 6 months, you wouldn't have to claim you were fired. You can just say you completed the apprenticeship and decided to move on.
Yes, but isn't the article basically saying you could buy a cheaper non-Ferrari and do a little work on it to make it comparable to a Ferrari? And in the end, it would be cheaper than buying the Ferrari outright.
I think the premise is reasonable. Why do you need a $5000 Ferrari? Is it to transport you from one place to another? Because then another car would do. And I think that's what this article is saying about these companies. They believe they can ignore all those Ferrari devs out there because they can build their own that will reasonably do the same thing at a price that is "suitable" for the company's needs.
I have a 5 year old who is a pretty good reader and seems to be naturally interested in math and computers/tablets. He'll get really interested in one thing for a while then float to something else.
I set him up on a super old laptop to run the desktop version of Scratch. I picked up a set of books by this publisher at Costco. He made it through 3 of the game tutorials and thought it was fun. The hardest thing for him was clicking/using the mouse and touchpad. https://www.amazon.com/DK-Workbooks-Coding-Scratch-Workbook/... We passed the books to some friends after he found something else to explore.
Currently, he's avidly playing a game called "Box Island" on iPad. It's a coding game with several free levels. I was pleasantly surprised when he finished the free levels after a few weeks (we limit iPad time) and requested I buy the remaining levels. Before this game, he was playing Kodable, which was free but had terrible graphics, imho.
We were gifted Robot Turtles but that didn't take.
To get it, he had to work there for months as an intern and overcome his manager’s misgivings as he got up to speed.
Is that so bad? It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to intern for a few months to demonstrate one's technical skills, after just 3 months of learning, are good enough for the company. Furthermore, it allows the candidate to show off some of the "intangible qualities of character" as described by another commenter.
I am assuming, of course, that the internship is not exploitive and that the company truly has the time and resources to mentor the intern. In the best case scenario, the manager would see culture fit and a new motivated employee who is open to growing into a great senior developer at the company. In the worst case scenario, at least the intern should have gotten some real world experience that can be leveraged into the next job.
I guess I'm taking issue with the tone of the sentence. Why wouldn't an internship be "good enough" for a coding bootcamp grad? And why would they have to fight a "manager's misgivings" since it would clearly cost the manager even more time and effort to find and train yet another person for the position. As the manager, it would be in my best interest to find an intern I think capable of succeeding AND to do my best to help him/her succeed!
Disclosure: I've hired a coding bootcamp grad as an intern and then was very glad to be able to promote him to full-time after a few months.
MoMath used to run an Online Topological Crochet class. I'm not sure if they will be bringing it back, though. https://momath.org/onlinecrochet/