I should write up my notes from talking to them. I explained that programming was like speaking a language computers understood and used Spanish and English as examples.
I defined code as the words computers understand.
I defined a program as a story made up of code that a computer knows how to read.
A couple of the great questions I got were "Do you like your job?" and "Do you like typing all day?"
My brother learned Cantonese fluently as a LDS Missionary. He then enlisted in the army after 9/11 and was given a battery of aptitude tests. I'm assuming this was one of them because he ended up at DLI learning Arabic and speaking that fluently as well.
DLI and being a Mormon missionary are about the two best places you can learn to speak a 2nd language fluently in a short amount of time.
There is a distinction between the Startup Battlefield (companies that are launching) and the Hackathon (apps and hacks made in a constrained time period). His criticism seems to be leveled at the Battlefield judging.
I heard about this via the Circa iOS app and then found this Youtube video while CNN was still just showing a map of the area the explosion happened in. The future of news isn't TV.
I recently helped host a hackathon in Vegas and we had several high school kids, including girls, attend. They were nervous and felt out of place at first among all the older developers. But they went in to win a significant prize at the event and are now very active in the VegasTech community.
Thank god they didn't have to deal with anything like this.
And as soon as I plugged in the projector the entire classroom erupted with shouts of "Mario!!!!"