Ever trying to make his way through Programming Python. He didn't get very far, and has since moved on to more age-appropriate reading material.

Ever was born in March of 2011, and we made a point to start reading with him as soon as we brought him home from the hospital. At first reading with him was easy, because it didn’t matter what we read. I read him articles from Linux Journal, selections from a thick book about programming in Python, and a few stories from The Way of Chuang Tzu. Ever was happy with all of these, as long as I kept holding him and he kept hearing my voice. But soon he became more aware of the words we were saying, and we had to find more appropriate books. It didn’t help that Linux Journal only had pictures of computers, the Python book only had text, and the Chuang Tzu book only had a few small line drawings. We kept an eye out for children’s books at garage sales, and Ever’s grandparents sent him books from when Erin and I were younger. We now have a couple shelves full of books just for Ever, and we already have some favorites. The books that have been on steady rotation throughout this first year have been On The Day You Were Born, Everywhere Babies, No Matter What, and several others.

Reading On The Day You Were Born

On The Day You Were Born
I think On the Day You Were Born was the first book we read with Ever. On The Day You Were Born tells Ever that the whole world – all the plants and animals, and the planet itself – were happy for his arrival:

On the eve of your birth
word of your coming
passed from animal to animal.
The reindeer told the Arctic terns…

I am a math and science teacher, so I was happy to see text that is poetic but grounded in scientific understanding, and illustrations that are beautiful but also scientifically accurate:

On the day you were born
gravity’s strong pull
held you to the Earth
with a promise that you
would never float away…

The illustration accompanying this passage shows a cross section of the planet. There is a hot core at the center of the planet, a layer of solidifying rocks surrounding the core, and a green crust with a few rivers of blue at the surface. A baby stands on the surface holding a single flower in the middle of a garden. The baby has both arms and one leg reaching up to the sky, but one foot is firmly anchored to the surface of the planet. The whole text has this same mix of poetic imagery with a basis in factual accuracy.

Erin, Ever, and Willie reading Everywhere Babies

Everywhere Babies
Erin’s favorite book so far is Everywhere Babies. It is a simple book, reminding us that the wonders happening in front of our eyes every day are happening all over the world:

Every day, everywhere, babies are fed
by bottle, by breast,
with cups, and with spoons,
with milk, and then cereal,
carrots, and prunes.

The book is honest, acknowledging the many different ways babies are taken care of around the world. We find ourselves quoting from Everywhere Babies from time to time, and making up our own variations on the book’s theme. The book never mentions crying, but sometimes when Ever is crying I find myself reminding him that “Every day, everywhere, babies are crying.” We then talk about why it’s okay for babies to cry sometimes, and how we are always looking out for his best interests, even when we let him cry about some things.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
Ever probably hears Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? at least once a week. He might even want to hear it more often, but he is not old enough to ask for a particular book yet.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear,
What do you see?
I see a red bird
looking at me.

There are large illustrations of each animal mentioned in the book. These are classic Eric Carle illustrations; if you don’t know him by name, you will probably recognize his style when you see the book. Ever loves to look at and touch the different animals’ features: the red bird’s wings, the yellow duck’s bill, and the green frog’s eyes. The book has a nice repetition to it, which makes it a fun book to give to people who want to read with Ever. Ever has had Brown Bear read to him by his grandmother, his aunt, his mother, and me. We all have our own style of reading, and it has been enjoyable to hear each other’s different reading styles. It reminds me that Ever will hear about the world from many different people, and someday develop his own perspective on the world. I also find myself inventing lines for this book when I find him looking at different things throughout the day. “Ever boy, Ever boy, what do you see?” “I see my mommy looking at me!” He smiles big when we say these kinds of things to him, and it’s pretty satisfying to see him recognize ideas that have been read to him from books.

No Matter What
Each of these books has an important message. In No Matter What, a baby fox is grumpy and thinks his mother couldn’t possibly love him anymore. His mother tells him she will always love him, no matter what. The baby fox imagines a number of amusing scenarios and asks if his mother would still love him:

But if I turned into a squishy bug,
would you still love me and give me a hug?

There is a funny illustration of a green bug sitting at the dinner table, trying to slurp a bowl of soup through his proboscis. His mother assures him that yes, she will always love him, no matter what. The illustrations are beautiful, and the story is timeless. This is a book I believe Ever will love throughout his childhood.

Mama, Do You Love Me?
Living in Alaska, we had to have a copy of Mama, Do You Love Me? In a theme similar to No Matter What, a young Inuit girl struggles to understand the depths of her mother’s love. She asks her mother how much she loves her, and how long she will love her. She asks her mother if she’d still love her after dropping the family’s ptarmigan eggs, and:

What if I put salmon in your parka,
ermine in your mittens,
and lemmings in your mukluks?

The little girl learns that she is her mother’s Dear One, and she will be her Dear One forever. I think it was after reading this book to Ever that I began calling him Little One, which I still love to call him.

This is pretty much what Ever would like to do with every book we read. Fortunately, Flutter Fly is made for this.

Reading is not very easy
Reading to Ever is not so easy these days. At first we could read him anything, because he just needed to be held throughout the day when he was awake. But as he has grown older, he is less content to just sit and listen. If it were up to him, he would eat every book we hold in front of him. So paper books are out for now, while board books and teething books like Flutter Fly are in. I enjoyed reading things like The Way of Chuang Tzu and Programming Python when Ever was really little, but now I enjoy the board books just as much. These are clearly becoming the books that he will remember hearing from his childhood. I am really looking forward to hearing his thoughts about these stories as he begins to talk, and to seeing which books he chooses for himself when he is able to.

find . -name "*.pyc" type -f | xargs rm -f

This finds all files with a name ending in .pyc, and sends these filenames to the rm command.  Of course, with any operation like this it is a really good habit to run the find command by itself first, and only run the full command when you are sure you will be removing the correct files.

The people at Shapeways really liked it as well; it made their blog!

Heart Dipping Dish - with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

Heart Dipping Dish - printed in ceramic

A typical scenario in education
Imagine you are a teacher who has just taken a position at a new school. It doesn’t matter if you are a brand new teacher or a teacher with significant experience. You familiarize yourself with the existing curriculum, and start to plan how you will present that curriculum. You open up Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, or OpenOffice, and write out your plans. Maybe you write a single, longer document with many pages for each day’s lessons, or maybe you write out many short documents of just a page or two each. Either way, you do most of your written work using a word processor. Even if you base your teaching on a textbook or a prepared curriculum, you still write out your own plans for how you will present the curriculum.

There are many subtle problems with this approach. For example, if you want to change the structure of your lessons by adding a journal prompt at the beginning of each lesson, you have a lot of manual editing to do. Word processing features such as “Find and Replace” will help you, as will copying and pasting, but you still have a lot of tedious work to do if you want to record improvements in your lesson structure. This happens often enough during the initial planning stage, but it also happens when we consider ways to improve instruction as we teach the same course multiple times. We find ourselves spending a significant amount of time updating our lesson plans as we use them each day, or we end up skipping the improvements altogether because it is so much work to change our written plans. The important thing to recognize is that the lack of a dedicated planning tool makes it more difficult to think about and implement improvements to the way we teach.

How it looks in the professional programming world
Imagine you are a programmer, and you are creating a website that tracks people’s workout performances. You set up pages that allow people to enter their favorite kinds of exercise, their favorite sports, the foods they eat, their lifestyle goals, and so on. How do you create these pages? You write out files that programmatically describe how the pages relate to each other, and that tell the pages how to handle your information. What tools do you use to write these files? There are a number of different options, but they are all dedicated to the task. They are all built to make your routine work easier, so you can stay focused on thinking about the harder problems in the project. For example, there are keyboard shortcuts to move within and between sections of the file, based on how each section is structured. The tools know what your programs should look like, and they make it easy to work with your files. A good programmer, using tools that every programmer knows about and has direct access to, can make major revisions to their work in a minimum number of steps.

A screenshot of emacs, one of the two oldest programming editors. Teachers need dedicated lesson-planning tools as much as programmers need dedicated code-editing tools.

Why do programmers have such efficient tools? The answer is simple, because early programmers knew how to make their own tools. Two of the most common programs for writing program files are emacs and vim. Emacs and vim were both created in 1976, and each has been in continuous development ever since. These programs are maintained by the professionals who use them every day.

What would this look like for educators?
To answer this question, we have to look at both the lesson planning tool itself and the culture of education as a whole. The lesson planning program itself would look more like a design tool than a writing tool. Consider that all lesson plans have some parts in common, and some optional parts. Common parts of a lesson include objectives, teaching time, and time for student work. So those might be blocks that are automatically placed on the screen, in which you enter the specifics for each lesson. These blocks would have default labels, but you would be free to override those labels; one teacher’s Objective might be another teacher’s Learning Target. The point is, there would be space to include an objective in every lesson. More significantly, in a group of related lessons, some of these parts would automatically carry over to the next lesson. The tool would automate your rote work and free you up to focus on the professionally challenging, intellectually interesting aspects of teaching.

Once an objective is entered into a lesson, it would become part of a resource library. If one objective takes several lessons to reach, you would only type it once. You would then be free to import it into other lessons. If you revise the wording of the objective to make it more specific or more clear, the revised language would appear in all lessons that include that objective, both previously written lessons and lessons written from this point forward. You would be encouraged to continually improve your lessons, with little to get in your way as you identify ways to improve instruction.

Widespread use is critical
There are plenty of lesson planning tools available right now, yet none of them has achieved widespread use. Widespread use means every teacher knows about them, and every teacher has direct access to them. Widespread use means these planning tools are continually being improved based on the actual needs of the best teachers in the education profession. Widespread use means they are incorporated into the day-to-day work of teacher preparation programs, and that everyone who enters the teaching profession is already familiar with good lesson planning tools. When this is the case, we will be making better use of the intellectual capital in our teacher force. The effective delivery of instruction to students of widely varying abilities and backgrounds is one of the most intellectually challenging pursuits in the world today. We want to make it as easy as possible for teachers to know the best instructional techniques and ideas, and to build incrementally on those ideas. Dedicated planning tools let teachers focus on using each other’s best ideas, rather than starting from scratch. They also make it easier for teachers to try out new ideas, and share their most successful techniques with others.

Next steps: making this happen
The first step in making this happen is to agree on the need for a dedicated planning tool for teachers. The next step is to agree on what that tool should be able to do. Programmers call this writing “specs”, the specifications of a project. Taking the time to write good specs is a step that is often skipped or abbreviated. But good specs are critical to good design. I will write separately about what a planning tool should do. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your feedback. What lesson planning tools do you currently use? What do you think a lesson planning tool should be able to do?

sed -i 's/cat/dog/g' animals/animals.txt

The -i argument causes sed to write the changes to the file directly, rather than outputting the new text to the screen. The s flag at the beginning of the regular expression tells it to substitute ‘dog’ for ‘cat’, and the g flag at the end makes the command act globally on the whole file, rather than just finding the first occurrence of ‘cat’. To make the command act recursively on every file in the directory, we can pipe the output of grep to sed:

grep -rl cat animals/ | xargs sed -i 's/cat/dog/g'

The -r flag makes grep act recursively on the directory, and the -l flag causes grep to output the names of the files that contain the word cat. The xargs command passes these filenames to the sed command.  We can exclude some directories, such as directories associated with version control, using the –exclude-dir option for grep:

grep -rl --exclude-dir='.git' cat animals/ | xargs sed -i 's/cat/dog/g'

It is also a good idea to run the grep command by itself first to make sure you are only affecting the files you want to change. These simple one-liners are good examples of why many of us will always use the command line for some tasks.

My father's copy of 'sed & awk'.

There is a bit more to the story of how I came to use sed myself, though. My copy of sed & awk came from my father, who learned to program using punch cards in the 1950s and 1960s. He worked as a software engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1970s and 1980s when I was growing up, and the first terminal he brought home from work had a printer for output instead of a monitor. I learned about programming from my father, and I enjoyed his stories about the people he worked with and the culture of software development as much as I enjoyed our technical conversations.

When my father passed away last spring, it was gut-wrenching for all of us. He died of a sudden heart attack, and I flew home to be with my mom and my brother. The week at home was a blur of heartache, trying to focus on good memories, and helping each other through everything that needed to be taken care of. Whenever I had the chance I went upstairs to his office, where I could be surrounded by his work and his books. My father had built bookshelves around two walls of his office, and one whole wall was a closet full of bookshelves. There were probably sixty or eighty feet of shelving in all, and I think he had the entire O’Reilly catalog on those shelves. I always loved visiting my parents, and finding books I was interested in but had not bought yet on my father’s bookshelf. I don’t know if every programmer owns that many books, but I sure got the impression it was a normal thing from my father.

At first I didn’t want to touch any of the books, and move them from where he had last placed them on the shelf. But I slowly started to pick a few out and look through them. I began to find his bookmarks, and his notes jotted in some of the margins. I saw that he highlighted the copyright date in most books. He stamped his name on the bottom of each book, and many books had gold seals which said, “This book belongs to Fred Matthes.” I found his receipts in many of the books; bookstore receipts in the older books, and Amazon invoices in the newer books.

My father bought his copy of Kernighan and Ritchie's "The C Programming Language" on November 16, 1985.

Over the next few days I got more comfortable looking through my father’s work as well. It started to feel less like prying, and more like hearing his voice one more time. It was sad, though, knowing he’d never finish the projects he was working on. Toward the end of my time at home, I realized it would be a good thing to go through his books. I wanted the good books to be kept in use, and I didn’t want the outdated books to end up in a library where someone would be tempted to learn HTML practices that were current in 1998. I took my time picking the books I wanted to keep. I found a couple cardboard boxes and filled them with some MySQL references, some Python books, some JavaScript texts, and others. I kept a few books that I would probably never read, but which made me think of my father, such as the copy of K&R he bought in 1985.

I cleared a shelf and made space to leave the books that I didn’t want, but which might be useful to someone else. My mom could let people look through them when they came to visit. Then I started carrying crates of old books down the stairs to the garage. I stacked them in a long row in the middle of the garage, where some of my mom’s friends could easily load them into a truck and take them to the recycling center. I weighed one crate before carrying it downstairs, just to get a sense of how many books I was actually moving. I thought it would weigh about sixty pounds, but the crate weighed ninety pounds. By the end, I had moved almost a thousand pounds of books out to the garage. It was very satisfying to finish such a concrete, physical task for my mom before leaving for Alaska again. It was also very grounding to put my hands on every book my father had in his office.

I had a few conversations with my mom and our neighbor to make sure the books would be recycled and not donated to a library, letting them know that my father would not want people trying to learn from the truly outdated books. I had kept my eye out through it all, though, for one or two books to leave behind. I wanted one programming book to leave in the house, in with my Mom’s books, that would keep my father’s technical spirit alive. I knew it as soon as I picked it up off the shelf: Donald Knuth’s three-volume series The Art of Computer Programming. Old-school like my father, but timeless. I sleep better these days knowing those three books are still sitting on a bookshelf in my mom’s house. I look forward to thumbing through them late at night the next time I visit my mom, probably while hanging out in my father’s old office space.

My father’s passing was rough on all of us, but his passing was also one last lesson for me on technology and software development. I always valued technical conversations with my father because he had a long-term, big-picture perspective on the field. Looking at his unfinished work made me realize how little the programs we are working on matter if they only live on our own hard drives. They are fun, just like the little programs we write for things like Project Euler. But the projects we are working on because we think they will solve problems for end users are useless if they never leave our own computers. My father’s final lesson was a reminder to release what we build, and not wait for it to be perfect. Thanks dad, I miss you.

At first I started second-guessing myself. Maybe I was seeing my students through rose-colored glasses, because I had enjoyed working on programming every morning with them. But when I asked what more I could have wanted from students in regard to how they treated themselves and others, I couldn’t think of much. Students had taken themselves more seriously, asked each other for help more consistently, offered help more readily, and treated school resources with more care than in any class I’ve seen. Students chose to work straight through normal break times, and worked into their lunch period on a regular basis. When I mentioned these scores to other staff, they nodded their heads immediately and said they had been noticing a different classroom culture throughout the session. What was it about programming that brought out the best in students?

Programmers are smart
Everyone knows that programmers are smart, and you have to be smart to learn programming. This means that anyone who begins to learn programming begins to feel smart. I am careful not to inflate students’ perceptions of their skills. In fact, I spend more time helping students understand how much they have left to learn if they want to work as a programmer, than I do congratulating them on how much they have already learned. Students respond well to this, in the same way that people respond well to Zed Shaw’s Learn Python the Hard Way. Young people value honest assessments of their skills and knowledge as much as they desire praise, if it is offered in a supportive way that helps them understand how to reach their goals. People are also looking for accessible intellectual challenges more than we often realize. People who feel smart, without having their egos falsely inflated, tend to treat themselves and everyone around them better.

Some parts of the Joel Test are really good for schools
I share the Joel Test with students to let them know what kinds of things will be expected of them if they want to pursue programming professionally. It’s also a nice reality check for students who have learned a little HTML and started to call themselves a programmer. I could give students a similar set of expectations, but having an external set of criteria such as the Joel Test speaks much more clearly to students. They come across as professional expectations, rather than just my classroom rules.

A few principles are more relevant to an introductory programming class than others. For example, programming students deserve a quiet working environment. This should be true in all classes, but having this listed as an explicit working condition for professional programmers carries much more weight than just hearing me as a teacher tell students to work quietly. Offering the right tools for learning to program makes students feel respected intellectually. In this class, this was as simple as letting students program in Linux, while most students in other classes use Windows. Every student in the class enjoyed using Linux. Most students were surprised to find that the internet runs on Linux, and they loved the chance to work in an environment other than Windows.

Everyone in programming class uses source control. At first this is just numbering files, but I introduce git as soon as students begin to create programs with more than one file. Even the practice of numbering files gives students more control over their work. Students make comments such as, “I could actually do this with my Word files in other classes, couldn’t I?” This growing sense of professionalism that students begin to develop makes them treat the equipment itself differently, and puts them in a position of helping students in their other classes use computers more effectively and more efficiently.

Students like the clarity of working from a spec in programming class. One common source of confusion in school is students simply not understanding their assignments. This simple issue leads to a fair amount of the minor behavior issues that contribute to a less respectful school culture than we would like to see. Working from a spec provides a clear process to avoid that confusion. Students are required to read their programming assignment, and then write a brief comment at the beginning of each file, explaining what that program is supposed to do. This process clarifies understanding before students begin to code, setting them up for success when they begin to code. This clarity helps students stay focused throughout a class.

Students love code reviews
To give students a sense of what it would be like to work in a professional programming environment, I instituted daily code reviews. I was not sure what students would think of sharing each other’s work on a daily basis, so I was pleasantly surprised to find out how much they enjoyed it. The more advanced students loved it because they got to show off their work, and got feedback on big-picture issues and syntax-level details. It brought out user-interaction issues that are difficult to sort out on your own, and helped keep all the pieces of programming in perspective. Students who were working more slowly also enjoyed code reviews, because they got positive reinforcement and could rely on the expertise of students who had already completed the programs they were still working on. At the end of the session, some students actually wanted more code reviews, and asked if we could do daily presentations in other classes as well. As much as students enjoyed code reviews, they did not want them to take too long. This made students want to be respectful and courteous to each other from the beginning of each class.

Students love beginning to identify as hackers, in the appropriate sense
One of the first things I teach every new student who is interested in technology-related fields is the correct meaning of the word hacker. Very few students know this meaning, and most of them make the same old comments about friends “hacking” each other’s facebook accounts, and people breaking into systems. I have no ear for this, and walk away from any student who goes on about it. But most students are curious about the actual meaning of the word, and are fascinated by stories such as Richard Stallman getting frustrated at not being able to hack his printer at the MIT lab, and learning about sites like Hacker News. As students begin to engage in the positive aspects of hacking, they feel connected to a really strong intellectual culture. Most students are not really hackers, and they become comfortable hearing that. But they start to understand what it would take to be one, and they begin to develop a sense of what it takes to excel in any field, technology-related or otherwise. The common understanding of what a hacker is centers around disrespectful behaviors; real hackers are quite respectful of themselves and others.

What next?
What does all of this mean? For one thing, we can always use more arguments for why programming classes should be offered in public schools. The positive impact of programming classes on school culture is not mentioned very often. Of course, you can’t just teach any programming class and expect students to treat each other well. You need teachers who get hacker culture, and who can communicate it effectively to students. Finding and keeping those teachers is an interesting challenge in itself.

It also means that the hacker culture has much to offer in terms of what good education looks like. Many of the best practices of the software development world carry over to education as well. There are many lists of guidelines for effective schools, but it is helpful to be able to look at school culture from a perspective outside of the insular world of education. It turns out that looking at education from the perspective of a well-run software development environment is a particularly effective way to spot inefficiencies in the school environment, and identify ways to improve it. Many of these improvements directly impact the level of courtesy and respect that students show on a daily basis.

I look forward to teaching more programming classes, and finding ways to bring meaningful aspects of the hacker culture into the school environment.

Comment thread on Classroom2.0

The main openSCAD site: http://www.openscad.org/
The openSCAD site describes the program, and the scripting approach it takes to 3d modeling. Installation files are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. The site also links to a number of other openSCAD resources, some of which are described here.

The openSCAD user manual: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual
The manual is very helpful in learning openSCAD. It is concise, and easy to read. I have used the language documentation section extensively, especially as I try to complete more complex models.

EduTech Wiki openSCAD Beginner’s Tutorial: http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/OpenScad_beginners_tutorial
This tutorial is a good companion to the openSCAD user manual. It covers a lot of the material in the openSCAD language documentation, but some of the examples are easier to understand than the examples in the manual.

Thingiverse Blog posts: http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/12/10/getting-started-with-openscad/
Thingiverse is a site that allows people to share their digital designs, and to share their approaches to 3d modeling. It focuses on the physical printing process as well as the design process. The authors of the site are fans of openSCAD, and they have a number of posts about using openSCAD on the Thingiverse Blog. The topics range from the very simple, such as using openSCAD for the first time, to more complex topics such as for loops and bezier surfaces. There is also a small series of tutorials on the site.

I Heart Robotics blog posts: http://www.iheartrobotics.com/2011/02/openscad-tip-round-1-of-3.html
The I Heart Robotics blog has a number of posts about more advanced uses of openSCAD. For example, there are posts about making rounded edges and corners, and making helical and toroidal shapes.

The openSCAD Mailing List: http://rocklinux.net/mailman/listinfo/openscad
There is a mailing list available for people interested enough to join, or to browse the archives. It is more focused on the development of openSCAD, but if you have a question about using openSCAD that does not seem to be answered elsewhere, it might be worth a visit to the archives. Marius Kintel, the creator of openSCAD, is actively involved in the list.

Next: Your First openSCAD Model

Installation on Linux Systems
If you are running a version of Ubuntu, you can install openSCAD through Synaptic. I have used this method several times, and have had no issues.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chrysn/openscad
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install openscad

A package is available for openSUSE as well.

If you are running another Linux distro, you can download the source and install openSCAD manually.

Installation on OS X and Windows

Pre-compiled binaries are available for OS X and Windows. There is also an installer for Windows.

Next: openSCAD resources

The standard openSCAD layout.

This summer I finally decided to try 3d modeling after reading an article in Wired magazine that laid out the process. I looked for an open source CAD program that would be straightforward to use, and that matched my design approach. I found openSCAD, which was perfect for me. openSCAD lets you write instructions for your designs, which I much prefer to designing with a mouse. Some aspects of openSCAD take some experience to understand, but it is still relatively easy to get started with the program.

Koch Snowflake, printed in stainless steel

My first project with openSCAD was a holiday ornament based on the Koch snowflake fractal. It was a very satisfying project, which pushed me to learn a number of different aspects of working with openSCAD, and doing 3d design work in general. This introduction will focus on something simpler than this project, because fractals get fairly difficult unless you have some programming experience.

Next: Installing openSCAD