Our eldest singing a classic song.
Oranges and Lemons
Tag: children
Our youngest, aged 2, may have just came up with his first joke.
Yellow duck: Quack quack quack. Quack quack quack quack.
Blue duck: Shut up. I hate quacking.
TRRTL – Logo on Coffee
tl;dr: TRRTL.COM is my reimplementation of a Logo on-screen turtle as a CoffeeScript-backed web application
For many children growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, their first exposure to computer programming may have come in the form of Logo, a general-purpose educational programming language best-known for its “turtle graphics” capabilities. By issuing commands to an on-screen – or, if they were really lucky, robotic – cursor known as a turtle, the student could draw lines and curves all over the screen (or in the case of robotic turtles: a large sheet of paper on the floor).
While our eldest and I were experimenting with programming (because, well…) a small robotic toy of hers, inspired by a book, it occurred to me that this was an experience that she might miss out on. That’s fine, of course: she doesn’t have to find the same joy in playing with Logo on an Amstrad CPC or a BBC Micro that I did… but I’d like her to be able to have the option. In fact, I figured, there’s probably a whole generation of folks who played with Logo in their childhood but haven’t really had the opportunity to use something as an adult that gives the same kind of satisfaction. And that’s the kind of thing I can fix.
TRRTL.COM is my attempt to produce a modern, web-based (progressive, offline-first) re-imagining of Logo. It uses CoffeeScript as its base language because it provides all of the power of JavaScript but supports a syntax that’s more-similar to that of traditional Logo implementations (with e.g. optional semicolons and unparenthesised parameters).
If you’ve not used Logo before, give it a go. Try typing simple commands like forward 100 (steps), right 90 (degrees), and so on and you’ll find it’s a bit like an etch-a-sketch. Click the “help” icon in the corner for more commands (and shorter forms of them) as well as instructions on writing longer programs and sharing your work with the world.
And of course the whole thing is open source in the most permissive way imaginable, so if you’re of an inclination to do your own experiments with <canvas>, Progressive Web Apps, and the like, you’re welcome to borrow from me. Or if anybody wants to tag-team on making a version that uses the Web Bluetooth API to talk to a robotic turtle or to use WebRTC to make LAN “multiplayer” turtle art, I’m totally game for that.
My volunteering and academic workload for the rest of this year is likely to reduce the amount of random/weird stuff I put online, so it might get boring here for a while. Hope this tides you over in the meantime.
How did our parents cope with just I-spy and 99 green bottles on -hour journeys? This is definitely the way to hypnotise kids in the car!
If your kid stops believing in Santa this year…
This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
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“In our family, we have a special way of transitioning the kids from receiving from Santa, to becoming a Santa. This way, the Santa construct is not a lie that gets discovered, but an unfolding series of good deeds and Christmas spirit.
When they are 6 or 7, whenever you see that dawning suspicion that Santa may not be a material being, that means the child is ready. I take them out “for coffee” at the local wherever. We get a booth, order our drinks, and the following pronouncement is made: “You sure have grown an awful lot this year. Not only are you taller, but I can see that your heart has grown, too. [ Point out 2-3 examples of empathetic behavior, consideration of people’s feelings, good deeds etc, the kid has done in the past year]. In fact, your heart has grown so much that I think you are ready to become a Santa Claus.You probably have noticed that most of the Santas you see are people dressed up like him. Some of your friends might have even told you that there is no Santa. A lot of children think that, because they aren’t ready to BE a Santa yet, but YOU ARE.
Tell me the best things about Santa. What does Santa get for all of his trouble? [lead the kid from “cookies” to the good feeling of having done something for someone else]. Well, now YOU are ready to do your first job as a Santa!” Make sure you maintain the proper conspiratorial tone.
We then have the child choose someone they know–a neighbor, usually. The child’s mission is to secretly, deviously, find out something that the person needs, and then provide it, wrap it, deliver it–and never reveal to the target where it came from. Being a Santa isn’t about getting credit, you see. It’s unselfish giving.
My oldest chose the “witch lady” on the corner. She really was horrible–had a fence around the house and would never let the kids go in and get a stray ball or Frisbee. She’d yell at them to play quieter, etc–a real pill. He noticed when we drove to school that she came out every morning to get her paper in bare feet, so he decided she needed slippers. So then he had to go spy and decide how big her feet were. He hid in the bushes one Saturday, and decided she was a medium. We went to Kmart and bought warm slippers. He wrapped them up, and tagged it “merry Christmas from Santa.” After dinner one evening, he slipped down to her house, and slid the package under her driveway gate. The next morning, we watched her waddle out to get the paper, pick up the present, and go inside. My son was all excited, and couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. The next morning, as we drove off, there she was, out getting her paper–wearing the slippers. He was ecstatic. I had to remind him that NO ONE could ever know what he did, or he wouldn’t be a Santa.
Over the years, he chose a good number of targets, always coming up with a unique present just for them. One year, he polished up his bike, put a new seat on it, and gave it to one of our friend’s daughters. These people were and are very poor. We did ask the dad if it was ok. The look on her face, when she saw the bike on the patio with a big bow on it, was almost as good as the look on my son’s face.
When it came time for Son #2 to join the ranks, my oldest came along, and helped with the induction speech. They are both excellent gifters, by the way, and never felt that they had been lied to–because they were let in on the Secret of Being a Santa.”
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First up: why do people post galleries of images of text to Imgur? At that point, you’re taking some information, making it take up more space, be readable by fewer people, be harder to translate, inaccessible to robots, and result in less-readable text. It drives me nuts. Anyway, I converted the original images (which you can find behind the link if you really want) into text, above, thereby improving the entire thing immeasurably.
That minor rage out of the way: I’m not a fan of telling children that Santa is “real” in the first place, but if you’re going to do that, the approach promoted by the author of the above might come a close second. I’ve always seen the concept of Santa as being the representation of the spirit of anonymous gift-giving, and I love it for that reason. Just like the Easter Bunny representing the spirit of hiding chocolate eggs for other people to find, this approach fosters honesty, maturity, and the joy of the season and doesn’t have to detract from the magic of Christmas.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
Poly Parents Evening
Our eldest, 4, started school this year and this week saw her first parents’ evening. This provided an opportunity for we, her parents, to “come out” to her teacher about our slightly-unconventional relationship structure. And everything was fine, which is nice.
I’m sure the first few months of every child’s school life are a time that’s interesting and full of change, but it’s been particularly fascinating to see the ways in which our young academic’s language has adapted to fit in with and be understood by her peers.
I first became aware of these changes, I think, when I overheard her describing me to one of her school friends as her “dad”: previously she’d always referred to me as her “Uncle Dan”. I asked her about it afterwards and she explained that I was like a dad, and that her friend didn’t have an “Uncle Dan” so she used words that her friend would know. I’m not sure whether I was prouder about the fact that she’d independently come to think of me as being like a bonus father figure, or the fact that she demonstrated such astute audience management.
I don’t object to being assigned this (on-again, off-again, since then) nickname. My moniker of Uncle Dan came about as a combination of an effort to limit ambiguity (“wait… which dad?”) and an attempt not to tread on the toes of actual-father JTA: the kids themselves are welcome to call me pretty-much whatever they’re comfortable with. Indeed, they’d be carrying on a family tradition if they chose-for-themselves what to call me: Ruth and her brothers Robin and Owen address their father not by a paternal noun but by his first name, Tom, and this kids have followed suit by adopting “Grand-Tom” as their identifier for him.
Knowing that we were unusual, though, we’d taken the time to do some groundwork before our eldest started school. For example we shared a book about and spent a while talking about how families differ from one another: we figure that an understanding that families come in all kinds of shapes and sizes is a useful concept in general from a perspective of diversity and and acceptance. In fact, you can hear how this teaching pays-off in the language she uses to describe other aspects of the differences she sees in her friends and their families, too.
Still, it was a little bit of a surprise to find myself referred to as a “dad” after four years of “Uncle Dan”.
Nonetheless: in light of the fact that she’d clearly been talking about her family at school and might have caused her teacher some confusion, when all three of us “parents” turned up to parents’ evening we opted to introduce ourselves and our relationship. Which was all fine (as you’d hope: as I mentioned the other day, our unusual relationship structure is pretty boring, really), and the only awkwardness was in having to find an additional chair than the teacher had been expecting to use with which to sit at the table.
There’s sometimes a shortage of happy “we did a thing, and it went basically the same as it would for a family with monogamous parents” poly-family stories online, so I thought this one was worth sharing.
And better yet: apparently she’s doing admirably at school. So we all celebrated with an after-school trip to one of our favourite local soft play centres.
This teacher had to tell her deaf students that people can hear farts. Their reaction was hilarious.
This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Anna Trupiano is a first-grade teacher at a school that serves deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing students from birth through eighth grade.
In addition to teaching the usual subjects, Trupiano is charged with helping her students thrive in a society that doesn’t do enough to cater to the needs of the hard-of-hearing.
Recently, Trupiano had to teach her students about a rather personal topic: passing gas in public.
A six-year-old child farted so loud in class that some of their classmates began to laugh. The child was surprised by their reaction because they didn’t know farts make a sound. This created a wonderful and funny teaching moment for Trupiano.
Trupiano shared the conversation on Facebook.
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Stranger Danger: Still the right message for children?
This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Many parents remember the “Stranger Danger” message given to children during the 1970s and 80s. Government videos warned children not to talk to people they didn’t know. But a new message is being trialled in the UK, which its creators think is better at keeping children safe.
“I tried to get the [old] Stranger Danger message across to my son a few years ago and it backfired badly,” says Suzie Morgan, a primary school teacher who lives in Fareham, Hampshire.
He got frightened and confused, couldn’t sleep at night and was worried somebody was breaking into the house.
Like any parent she wanted to keep her child safe.
But she felt the Stranger Danger message she was teaching – which she herself had grown up with – was unhealthy for her six-year-old son, making him too afraid of the world.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” she says.
So she was hopeful when her son’s school piloted a new safety message. It’s called Clever Never Goes and was devised by the charity Action Against Abduction.
It aims to make children less afraid of the world, by giving them the confidence to make decisions about their own personal safety.
Morgan says it has given her son more freedom and independence.
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Linda Liukas, Hello Ruby and the magic of coding
This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Linda Liukas’s best-selling Hello Ruby books teach children that computers are fun and coding can be a magical experience.
See the original article to watch a great video interview with Linda Liukas. Linda is the founder of Rails Girls and author of a number of books encouraging children to learn computer programming (which I’m hoping to show copies of to ours, when they’re a tiny bit older). I’ve mentioned before how important I feel an elementary understanding of programming concepts is to children.
Oat the Goat
This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Oh my Goat! We just finished reading this awesome pick-a-path story that helps children learn the power of kindness. Have a go… #OatTheGoat
Discovered this fun interactive storybook; it tells the tale of a goat called Oat who endeavours to climb a mountain (making friends along the way). At a few points, it presents as a “choose your own adventure”-style book (although the forks are artificial and making the “wrong” choice immediately returns you the previous page), but it still does a reasonable job at looking at issues of bullying and diversity.
AC/DC’s littlest fan?
Bonky bonk bonk!
The Better Bundo Book
Today, I received my long-awaited copy of A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, a book inspired by the US Vice President’s family pet not to be confused with Marlin Bundo’s A Day in the Life of the Vice President, which it satirises. In case you’ve been living under a rock: the family of US Vice President Mike Pence have a pet rabbit called Marlon Bundo (and who doesn’t appreciate some punmanship in their pet’s name) and they wrote the latter book that attempts to explain, through the eyes of Marlon Bundo, what the Vice President does. And then John Oliver, who’s become a bit of a master of doing nice things in a dickish way, released the former a few hours earlier and subsequently thoroughly outsold the Pence book.
This self-proclaimed “better Bundo book” tells a different (educational and relevant) story: in it, Marlon Bundo falls in love with another boy rabbit but their desire to get married is hampered by the animals’ leader, the Stink Bug, who proclaims that “boy rabbits can’t marry boy rabbits; boy rabbits have to marry girl rabbits!” With the help of the other animals, the rabbits vote-out the Stink Bug, get married, and go on a lovely bunnymoon… a cheery and uplifting story and, of course, a distinctly trollish way to piss off the (clearly anti-LGBT) Mike Pence. This evening, I decided to offer it as a bedtime story to our little bookwork. At four years old, she’s of an age at which the highly-hetronormative narratives of the media to which she’s exposed might be only-just beginning to sink in, so I figured this was a perfect vehicle to talk about difference, diversity, and discrimination. Starting school later this year means that she’s getting closer to the point where she may go from realising that her family is somewhat unusually-shaped to discovering that some people might think that “unusual” means “wrong”, so this is also a possible step towards thinking about her own place in the world and what other people make of it.
Her initial verdict was that it was “sweet”, and that she was glad that the Stink Bug was vanquished and that Marlon and Wesley got to live together happily-ever-after. I explained that while the story was made-up, a lot of what it was talking about was something that really happens in this world: that some people think that boys should not marry boys and that girls should not marry girls, even if they love them, and that sometimes, if those people get to be In Charge then they can stop those people marrying who they love. I mentioned that in our country we were fortunate enough that boys can marry boys and girls can marry girls, if they want to, but that there are places where that’s not allowed (and there are even some people who think it shouldn’t be allowed here!). And then I asked her what she thought.
“They’re like the stinky Stink Bug.”
That’ll do.
Are You Ready to Have Friends with Kids?
This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Once you have friends with kids, your life is no longer about you. It’s about your friends’ kids.
Having friends with kids is a huge responsibility. It’s not for everyone. Maybe you like swearing, and having a child in the room would cut into that. Maybe you have ambitions outside of liking Facebook pictures of wispy-haired toddlers in pumpkin patches. Maybe you’re terrified that your friends will ask you to hold the baby and you won’t know what to do with the head because its neck doesn’t work yet and you’re afraid you’ll kill it.
Many couples choose not to have friends with kids and find fulfilling friendships with like-minded couples who also value disposable income over propagating the human race. Before you decide if having friends with kids is right for you, it’s important to ask yourselves a few questions.
Having friends with kids is a huge responsibility. It’s not for everyone. Maybe you like swearing, and having a child in the room would cut into that. Maybe you have ambitions outside of liking Facebook pictures of wispy-haired toddlers in pumpkin patches. Maybe you’re terrified that your friends will ask you to hold the baby and you won’t know what to do with the head because its neck doesn’t work yet and you’re afraid you’ll kill it.
Many couples choose not to have friends with kids and find fulfilling friendships with like-minded couples who also value disposable income over propagating the human race. Before you decide if having friends with kids is right for you, it’s important to ask yourselves a few questions.
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Games to Play With Your Child in Which You Barely Have to Move or Talk
This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
I see a lot of ideas online for things to do with your child, but most of them are a lot of work. Many of them involve an unnerving amount of craftiness and/or require going out to buy things. Almost all of them involve moving around which, many days, is fine, but some days can be pretty rough. N...
I see a lot of ideas online for things to do with your child, but most of them are a lot of work. Many of them involve an unnerving amount of craftiness and/or require going out to buy things. Almost all of them involve moving around which, many days, is fine, but some days can be pretty rough. Not that I don’t love getting down on the floor and playing with my kid (I love it a great deal) but I’m an adult in my mid-thirties. I can pretend to be a dinosaur for about 90 minutes (something I happily list on my professional resume) but after an hour and a half, all bets are off. And given that many days I’m home with my son for over eight hours, things can get a bit dicey.
I’ve taken the liberty of brainstorming some fun child/parent activities in which your child can be adventurous and creative and you can lie on the sofa reading a book. Here’s my list so far.
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