James Siminoff

Middle School Innovation

Fred did a post this week titled “Getting Computer Science Into Middle School”.  As always it is worth a read but basically it talks about teaching kids prprograming languages like Ruby on Rails and how important that is for the future.

I saw a great example of this reading Popular Science on my flight to Mountain View yesterday.  A middle school kid from Hudson River Valley, NY named Patrick Insinger hacked a alarm clock so that it would not go off on snow days.  In order to do this he modified some software to scrape the info off of his middle school’s website and then talk to the alarm clock through a controller.  You can find out more about his project at instructables.com.