
Girls and Computers - taylorbuley
http://rmurphey.com/blog/2012/03/25/girls-and-computers/
======
ChuckMcM
The thing that stands out in many of these stories are these three points:

    
    
       * Accessible price point,
       * Instantly usable to write code, 
       * a place to go when the capabilities ran out.
    

It is very challenging to reliably buy this today. When my daughter wanted a
computer a gave her a VAX 4000/VLC, it had BASIC, C, FORTRAN, and COBOL
installed and could run adventure. I got it for free from a junk pile.

I'm going to try and fix that. [edited for formatting]

~~~
Jun8
I would add one thing:

    
    
      * impoverished environment
    

This, I think is crucial. Given a Linux machine with a rich GUI or an iPad,
kids focus on the eye candy and start playing with those things. A
(relatively) limited environment at the same time focuses them and makes them
creative.

~~~
femto
I'd add another thing, both good and bad: turning if off returned it to a
known state.

This meant you could experiment with it, to the point where it broke, secure
in the knowledge that recovery was as far as a quick flick of the power
switch. The negative was that for complex projects, where you wanted to
preserve the state of the machine, you had to play cassette roulette.

~~~
gaius
Tape drives for Commodores and Acorns at least, were pretty reliable, just
slow.

~~~
femto
The VZ-200 (contained a TRS-80 rom) was atrocious!

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mml
It's interesting to me how little difference there is between her experience
and my own (male) early experience with computers.

Though on second thought, it's not at all surprising.

~~~
roguecoder
I think we have a tendency to assume "people like us" are, well, people like
us. Some things are more universal than we think.

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hzy
I'm not sure if I can see the correlation between the story being told and the
fact that the author is female. It seems to be briefly mentioned in the first
and last paragraphs.

~~~
msbarnett
> I'm not sure if I can see the correlation between the story being told and
> the fact that the author is female.

I saw a quip the other day that was along the lines of "Hacker News posters
consistently make the mistake of assuming that, because a post shows up on
Hacker News, the author is somehow 'making a big deal out of it'".

The "correlation" is that the author, after a spate of sexism stories
regarding women in tech, got to thinking about how she got started as a woman
in tech, and wrote a blog post sharing the story.

It's a slice of a story of someone's life, nothing more, nothing less. Don't
try to read too much into it looking for larger correlations and grand
overarching Big Deal Points.

~~~
kiiski
You're probably right, but the post is titled "Girls and Computers", which
kind of seems to imply some deep, and general, theorizing about girls and
computers.

~~~
msbarnett
> You're probably right, but the post is titled "Girls and Computers", which
> kind of seems to imply some deep, and general, theorizing about girls and
> computers.

Or that she's been spending some time thinking about "girls and computers"
after the news stories about girls and computers and it made her think of her
own story.

That's how I read it, anyways. Obsessing about the "deeper meaning" of a 3
word title and whether or not it is the best description of the content seems
a bit pointless.

~~~
Strallus
Article titles should match their content.

~~~
msbarnett
I'm not convinced it doesn't, but either way, this is pedantry of the most
unproductive sort.

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hetman
A lot of the responses here seeking a modern alternative to this experience
seem to be focusing on hardware. In a way that's not surprising but I think
it's a bit of a shame. That's because I think we have a platform today that
can rival the ease and immediate feedback of those early computers: the web
browser. There are probably a couple things needed to complete the picture.

1) A nice basic library that can serve as an immediate stepping stone to the
UI. There's probably some out there already that are very beginner friendly.

2) Some kind of REPL/IDE like browser extension to make it easy to dive in
right away. Something a bit easier for kids to wrap their head around than the
developer tools of today, but also incorporating a basic editor so they can
edit in place, save files etc.

I'm not really sure about the form of (2) or how vital it is, but it certainly
wouldn't hurt.

~~~
jbattle
I'd second this suggestion. Another great 'feature' of this platform is that
it's trivially easy for the learner to share his/her creations with friends.

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Joeri
I doubt it will be possible to recapture the golden age of early PC's and
their ability to get kids programming. The computing landscape has changed,
and educational practices must change with it. We have to assume kids will
have ipads as their first computer and treat them accordingly.

Kids these days are web users first and foremost. You have to let them cross
the gap between visiting sites and creating sites. There's plenty of
opportunity for sites that let kids create stuff in javascript and share it
with their friends. What's so different from animating a canvas using
javascript and animating a tv screen using basic?

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Akram
I guess Children of Tech savvy parents become hackers...

