Hacking The Kid
It’s not like we have a foot in the grave here or anything, but every once in a while, today’s kids make us feel old—learning how to configure your mobile phone from a 12-year old doesn’t really help that youthful feeling. With a PC in nearly every middle class home, and more on the way,it’s no surprise that parents summon the off-spring every time an error message baffles them. The kids will be exposed to technology no matter how much you “protect” them fromit—even if you don’t buy a PC; the best you can do is ensure they’re using applications that will be of some use to them.
Celestia
What Google Earth is to, well, Earth, Celestia isto the universe! All right, so that’s perhaps a tad exaggerated—though Celestia is based on actual data gathered by the Hubble space telescope,and it does let you navigate to planets and stars and view them from any angle you like.
The universe that you view is supposedly in the state it should be at that instant—if you see the Earth at point X in Celestia, it’s estimated that it’s at the same point in real life. We can’treally verify this, what with being unable to afford a trip to space, but we’re told that the estimate is more than dependable. The interfaceis quite easy to use—if you’re on a random star-hunt, just click on a star you like (double-click to centre that star in your view) and hit [G] to goto it. After a brief, very Star Trek-like trip, you’reat the star you chose, with a little scientific in for-mation about the star at the upper-left corner ofthe screen. The best way to start with Celestia,though, is to run the demo ([D]), which takes you through the Solar System, some popular con-stellations, an interesting star or two, and a view of the Milky Way. It also gives you an idea of the features you have at your disposal—viewing the orbits of heavenly bodies, for instance.
For even more educational value, download the Celestia Educational Activities add-on fromhttp://celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/educa-tional.php—the tours of the universe (completewith sound) are more exhilarating than your first day at the planetarium. Each activity comes with a guide for educators—helpful if you’reteaching a group of children about the universe.
Scratch
MIT’s Scratch teaches children programming the only way they’ll learn—with lots of visual elements
You can’t argue that software programming isn’ta lucrative career today—and India’s alreadybooming IT industry still has a long climb ahead of it—we haven’t built our answer to Microsoft yet, have we. We’re not asking you to breed soft-ware engineers, but monetary promises aside, programming also teaches children to think ana-lytically, break down problems to little bits, and generally figure out how technology works.
The researchers at MIT’s Lifelong Kinder-garten project have come up with the Scratch pro-gramming language, which teaches children programming through visual elements. Loops, for example, are shown as bright orange clamps that enclose code, and the code itself is a bunch of statements inside inter connecting blocks. Think of it as drawing a flowchart before actually coding, only the flowchart is the code itself. The resultant program isn’t one of those boring old
console programs—the scripts you create apply to anima-tions. You can create games, presentations, and even whatthey like to call “interactive art.”
Check out the Web site to see what Scratch is capable of, and sit down with your child and create your next masterpiece together—you can even share it on the site!
sam.samier@gmail.com (sam)
