ReadWriteWeb

In my post over the weekend about how you don't need a diploma to code, I was thinking about the multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming that was written by former Stanford CS prof Donald Knuth. Knuth tomorrow turns 74 and it is worth taking a look at various things that you can find online as a means of celebrating his rich and varied life.

It's been over a decade since the beloved brick-building toy company Lego introduced Mindstorms, its robotics system designed to help kids learn programming, along with other science, technology, engineering and math concepts. We've featured Lego Mindstorms previously in our series on tools for teaching kids to code, and Mindstorms is part of Lego's broader educational efforts.

Although Mindstorms kits are available commercially, there are a series of specifically educational tools that the company has developed in conjunction with other organizations, including MIT, Pitsco, and National Instruments. These help expand robotics education beyond what was, arguably, the initial target audience: middle-school age boys.

Wish you could add a "clap on" and "clap off" option to more devices in your house? Want to be able to program your coffee pot to sound an alarm when it's done brewing? A Rutgers University project aims to make those sorts of automations easy for anyone to add to their household appliances, with a little help the graphical programming language Scratch.

Scratch is often cited as one of the best introductory languages for teaching kids - or anyone, really - to code. So it's no surprise that a Rutgers University honors class called "Programming for the Masses" would utilize Scratch as part of its goal of making programming a more accessible, everyday skill. What is unique - and if I may say so, pretty fun - is the direction that a research project, an outgrowth of the class, has taken since.

This week is National Computer Education Week, aimed at recognizing the crucial role of computing in today's world and at supporting efforts to boost computer science education at all levels. The event purposefully coincides with Grace Hopper's birthday tomorrow. But it also happens to come the same week that the Program for International Student Assessment has released its data about student performance and finds that, compared to others worldwide, U.S. students get a C for math and science.

In a recent PC Pro article, Professor Steven Furber, developer of the ARM microprocessor, laments the sharp decline in interest in computer science classes in the UK. And although the U.S. hasn't seen that same drop in enrollment, a recent survey of some 14,000 U.S. high school teachers by the Computer Science Teachers Association found that only 65% of respondents taught in a school that offered some sort of introductory computer science course.

As our world becomes more tech-oriented, educators are faced with not just teaching children how to use computers, but how to build and program them as well.

Professor Francisco Santos of the University of Santander in Spain announced that he had disproved what is known in mathematics circles as the Hirsch Conjecture. Professor Santos will be presenting his proof in July at the 100 Years in Seattle Conference, dedicated to the mathematics of Klee and Grunbaum.

We talk a lot in ReadWriteWeb about the products of mathematics, the programs and devices that amplify and extend the reach of our human dreams. But we rarely talk about the structure that underlies these things and makes them possible. There's a reason for that. Math is hard. So, I wrote a sonnet.

Ubuntu, the open source operating system, is ditching the system tray, the bar at the bottom of most browsers that is supposed to act as a notification area. The rationale for the change, according to Matthew Paul Thomas, an Ubuntu contributor, was "its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior."

The proliferation of notification icons, that are not really associated with the delivery of any kind of notification, has added to the ineffectiveness, junking up the tray and making it harder to read at a glance.

"Many modern web sites need fast access to an amount of information so large that it cannot be efficiently stored on a single computer," Nick Kallen wrote on Twitter's blog. "A good way to deal with this problem is to 'shard' that information; that is, store it across multiple computers instead of on just one.

As an alternative to sharding, Twitter has developed a framework that can be used in lieu of either custom-building data-store systems or using untested open-source alternatives and is sharing the code with the public.

Today's startups, entrepreneurs and investors live and die by what seem like a series of holy proverbs. "Release early, release often" is perhaps one of the most poignant phrases when considering product launch and feature scope. On this cold Saturday, we're paying homage to the origins of the concept by recognizing one of the seminal works in programming philosophy, and looking at a recent startup that's taken it to heart.

Sending a piece of source code for troubleshooting to one of your friends or colleagues can be a hassle. Snipt.org provides a new solution for this. Just copy and paste your code into Snipt, tell it what programming language it is in, and Snipt will give you a short URL for your code snippet to hand out on Twitter. The developers want you to think of it as "twitpic, but for code and long text," though it is really a lot more flexible than that.