Howard Rheingold explores teaching computational thinking with Ready
Media theorist and author Howard Rheingold writes about Ready for the Digital Media + Learning research hub .
“Visual programming languages and programming as a learning tool are old dreams, rooted in the late Seymour Papert’s creation of the Logo programming language for children. Lately, many promising variants — all of them based on visual rather than command-line interfaces — are popping up: Scratch, a successor to Logo, has been evolving in the MIT Media Lab’s “Lifelong Kindergarten;” Google has entered this arena with Blockly, “a library for building visual programming editors;” UC Berkeley’s Snap focuses on robotic control, as does Roberta. Many of these are powerful learning instruments, but because they run in their own “sandboxes,” are not meant for creating apps that run in the wild. David Bennahum’s visual programming language Ready, “an open-ended software creator,” is intended to change that.”