Recovering from long-COVID
In non-pandemic years I run programming clubs, events, and classes in school and out of school to enable more young people, especially girls, to experience to joy of programming. My website shows some of the things we get up to:
http://www.programming-uk.com/
During 2020 I had great plans to update my creative programming materials and website and to learn to run clubs and events online. Instead, 2020 is a blur and I keep on finding plans that I can barely remember writing!
I have now started bringing my website up to date and will “soon” add some of the python, java & c worksheets under the creative materials link.
The key to learning programming is finding something that is exciting for you to make: like arts and crafts — i.e. what do you want to spend your emotional energy making? — And access to free & easy to use programming resources.
1. I spend quite a lot of time helping the students in my programming clubs find out what they are interested in and what they would like to make.
2. Repl.it has a lot of languages, including java & c++, other graphical languages, and being able to run from a bash shell:
3. Google codelabs has a range of languages and a range of applications, including java & c++ for Android, javascript & firebase for web apps, and tensorflow for machine learning:
https://codelabs.developers.google.com/
4. Android studio is a free IntelliJ integrated development environment for Android development in Java, Kotlin & C++, with Gradle and performance monitoring built-in:
https://developer.android.com/studio/
Android Studio is my go-to tool for showing what a development environment should look like and what features a developer should learn how to use.
5. Codebar are community groups that run weekly or monthly activities and tutorials — now as virtual sessions:
6. I would recommend you set up a GitHub repository for your learning, so you can share your work and learn about version control and review tools:
GitHub also has a rather cool github.io that lets you use GitHub as a web server and an API if you want to render pages more carefully. I don’t know how to do that but I have a friend who can :-)
I think of computers as creative amplifiers—what you decide to make is up to you. If you need some creative stepping stones, my daughter’s github repository has a rather nice solar system project and my ‘computer vision’ repl.it has some image processing things in c that I put together to show how easy PaintShop filters are to code and why you don’t need complicated libraries.
The ‘show more’ button on my repl.it reveals more project ideas.
I hope you are motivated to make & share your fantastic creative ideas.
