Facebook are famous for their hacking culture and employees frequently participate in internal hackathons to try out new ideas and generally build something cool that will impress their peers. Reportedly as many as 70% of hackathon projects ship and notable Facebook features such as Timeline were the product of hackathons. In addition to internal hackathons Facebook frequently teams [...]
The lean startup, the Hacker’s Way and the evolution of Necrotising Facebookiitis
“Doing a startup” isn’t easy. Reading tech blogs makes it looks easy. People with obscure ideas seem to raise inordinate amounts of funding with no actual product. Look at Color for pity’s sake (http://gigaom.com/2011/03/24/is-colors-team-really-worth-41m-idea-be-damned/) and they can’t even spell! You hear about how one day an app is blocked by Facebook and then the next [...]
A workshop on algorithms for primary schools
I recently ran a workshop on algorithms in the school where I am a governor (Bewdley Primary School) for a more able group of upper Key Stage 2 pupils (aged 9-11) from three of our four local primaries. This was in many ways the follow up to a workshop I ran last year which was [...]
Karmr – social sharing and rewarding of positive actions
It is undeniable that social media is a hugely powerful thing. Be it the ability to share your life’s experiences with friends and family on Facebook, follow up-to-the-minute buzz on Twitter or create photo or video logs of your life on Instagram or Vine, social media is well and truly part of modern society. Is [...]
Karmr and startup metrics for fat pirates
As some of you may know, Karmr is a social network for actions. It works a lot like other social networks except that, in the same way as Instagram and Vine chose to focus on a specific media type, we chose to focus on a topic type – things that people did. There is an [...]
How to fix the Mountain Lion App-Store / System Preferences crash issue
I recently upgraded my iMac to Mountain Lion and like a bunch of people had a fairly annoying issue where certain things just crashed. In fact pretty much the first thing I did was try to add a Twitter account though System Preferences. It was all fine until I hit the button to add the account but [...]
Radial and rectangular sinusoidal damping functions for iOS game dev in Cocos2d
I had to make a function that morphed the contents of an area in a Cocos2d game recently and I came across the problem of blending the effect inside my affected area with the outside. To overcome this and remove the sharp transition that was visible I created a couple of damping functions – one [...]
So, what is Computing++ (Helping teachers gain computer science skills through local experts)
There is no doubt that computing and computer science are huge part of both our economy and society. Technology changes at a huge rate and unfortunately the UK education system hasn’t kept up very well. At current ICT lessons mainly focus on how to use software – which is important – but do not attempt [...]
Asynchronous processes in Android – Extending the AsyncTask class
A common requirement in any data driven Android app is the ability to download data asynchronously. This might be to lookup locations for a Google Maps view or to acquire dynamic app data. In order to do this you need to create a nested inner class that extends the AsyncTask class. To do this is [...]
A strategy for computer science education in UK schools
A few weeks ago I wrote about a workshop that I ran at the primary school where I am a governor. It felt like I was doing something pretty important and I am still amazed at the response that my post had – even the Guardian picked it up and it has had over 1000 [...]
- The day I tried teaching primary school kids to code (and succeeded)
- How to build a successful start-up ecosystem (in the UK)
- The future of eCommerce – mCommerce?
- Radial and rectangular sinusoidal damping functions for iOS game dev in Cocos2d
- How to fix the Mountain Lion App-Store / System Preferences crash issue
- Zammer wins the Facebook / Gates Foundation Hack Ed 2.0 Hackathon
- The lean startup, the Hacker’s Way and the evolution of Necrotising Facebookiitis
- A workshop on algorithms for primary schools
- Karmr – social sharing and rewarding of positive actions
- Karmr and startup metrics for fat pirates
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Ben Guise: I recently introduced programming to my first grad...
- Boot up: HTML5 mobile benchmarks, Firefox leads Chrome, pirates v downloaders and more: [...] The day I tried teaching primary school kids...
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weerdboil: Martin, Interesting point you make about big UK...
- The day I tried teaching primary school kids to code (and succeeded) | Martin Saunders | Technology and Educational Innovation: [...] primary school kids to code (and succeeded) ...
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