Posted on April 26th, 2015 by Joy Schwabach
“Lovelace & Babbage” is a free iPad app for a comic book about the lives of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. Ada, born in 1815, was the daughter of the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” poet, Lord Byron. After being steered toward math to tame her wild blood, she invented the first computer language for the first computer. (The computer was never finished but was fully conceived by Babbage.) A print version just came out, for $21, re-titled “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.”
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Posted on March 18th, 2015 by Joy Schwabach
PhotoMath, a free app, lets you take a picture of an equation and get an answer plus the steps involved. (Does not recognize handwriting.) Assuming you already have it on a screen somewhere, this is easier than re-typing the mathematical expression at sites like WolframAlpha.com. PhotoMath already has 11 million downloads for the iPhone and Windows Phone version. That’s a lot of downloads but it didn’t work for us. You try it. An Android version is coming soon.
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Posted on December 31st, 2014 by Joy Schwabach
— “Lauren Ipsum” by Carlos Bueno is the story of a little girl who must find her way home by thinking like a programmer. It may do for children what Douglas Hofstadter’s “Godel, Escher, Bach” did for Joy back in the 1980s: get them excited about programming ideas. The name “Lauren Ipsum” comes from the dummy text used as filler when printers don’t have the actual text of a page yet or want to show off a font. It’s been around since the 1500s, when an unknown printer used assorted type to make a specimen book. The book’s title character tackles classic problems like “Zeno’s Paradox” and “The Traveling Salesman.” Each chapter connects to a real-life computer science lesson in […]
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Posted on October 12th, 2014 by Joy Schwabach
Ptable.com is an interactive periodic table. We clicked on “rhenium” and learned it’s used in jet engines. Who knew?
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Posted on October 8th, 2014 by Joy Schwabach
Spreeder.com is a free speed reading tool. Paste the text you want to read in the window on the page and the words will flash by at any speed you choose. (This reminds Bob of an old Woody Allen joke: He learned speed reading and went through Tolstoy’s massive “War and Peace” novel in six minutes. He said it seemed to be about Russia.) Because you don’t have to keep a finger on your place, you’ll find your reading speed increasing by 50 percent the first time you try it. We did. The site gives you sample text to practice with, but we went beyond that: We pasted in a bunch of text from “Tarzan of the Apes,” free at […]
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Posted on September 10th, 2014 by Joy Schwabach
Livemocha.com is a language learning community that covers more tongues that you ever thought you might want to know. Say it in Farsi (Iranian), or Zulu (South African tribal language).
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Posted on September 5th, 2014 by Joy Schwabach
“Tinkerbox HD” by AutoDesk is a free puzzle game for iPhone/iPad/iPod, for teaching basic engineering concepts. Build outrageous machines or download popular inventions
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Posted on September 4th, 2014 by Joy Schwabach
“Weird but True!” from the National Geographic. It’s a free kids app for iPhone/iPad/iPod that lets you in on some of Nature’s strangest secrets. Like: Cheetahs can change direction in mid air while chasing prey. Or so they say.
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Posted on August 9th, 2014 by Joy Schwabach
Memrise.com has foreign language instruction as well as lessons in science and literature. The repetitive nature of its quizzes makes learning easier.
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Filed under: education, Internuts | Comments Off on LEARNING ANOTHER LANGUAGE
Posted on August 2nd, 2014 by Joy Schwabach
CourseReport.com programmers headclaims that schools and camps teaching programming, often called “coding,” will bring in $60 million in tuition for the year and graduate 5,987 coders, a 175 percent increase over last year. Tuition can cost up to $20,000, with the average around $10,000 for courses ranging from nine to 12 weeks. All in all, this seems expensive to us.
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Filed under: education, programming, web | Comments Off on THE PROGRAMMERS WAY
