Three years ago I had great fun teaching some primary school children how to use Scratch and take their first steps towards being computer programmers of the future.
At the time there was a lot of optimism about changes to the English curriculum and a return to a more rigorous teaching of computing in schools.
Today, though, there is a pretty predictable warning that things aren’t going to plan – like so much else in the last seven years good intentions were not backed up by the money needed to make the policy really work.
Back then I decided I was going to write a “book” on how to code – my principal audience being teachers who suddenly found themselves with the requirement to teaching basic coding … but had a change of job, couldn’t continue the teaching and nothing much happened.
But, having had another, err, change of job (to currently no job – have a look here if you want to hire me), I’m now determined to finish it and so I am also looking for anyone willing to read it through.
I don’t intend to charge for it, so it’s not a commercial operation, but I would be interested in hearing from anybody who has an interest in learning to code/learning more about computing but who is not an experienced programmer – crudely put, if you think the “book” stinks then I probably won’t make much more of an effort with it, if you think it is good or getting there then I’ll keep working on it, trying to make it e-reader compatible and so on.
Let me know in the comments or directly: adrianmcmenamin at Google’s email service.
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A few days ago I asked for volunteers to read a book I was writing on programming, using Scratch, MIT’s visual, event-driven, programming environment.