Programming Literacy Lab
Computers and software of all kinds have generally been designed and built by engineers for the broad populace to use. Computing is becoming ubiquitous, and the skills for using computers are becoming as standard as reading and writing. Yet few of these tools are designed for everyone to edit them. We are teaching read-only computer literacy to the vast majority of students. No one would advocate teaching people to read without teaching them how to write. We need to think the same way about computers. This means changing the way we think about designing these tools. Most computing tools (computers, PDAs, mobile phones, etc) are designed to be read-only. We will work on developing read/write tools.
This lab is focusing on two programming environments: Pure Data and Arduino. Pure Data provides a testbed for experimenting with ideas for graphical, real-time programming, and Arduino makes building your own computer possible on a small and affordable scale. All of the work of this lab is free, open-source software and hardware.
Activities
- Usability and Programming Language Design
- Usability has had a large impact on software design, now it is time to apply these methodoliges to develop a more human programming language that enables read/write computer literacy.
- NYC Hacklab
- Working collaboratively is much more productive and enjoyable. Hacklabs are places to meet with people from all over the region from many different institutions and organizations.
- Build Farm
- We provide a compile farm which runs nightly builds of related software to support the developers.
Related Outside Projects
While not directly involved in the development of this software, they are something that we use and follow.
- Processing
- Processing is a Java sandbox, making Java a much more accessible programming environment. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook.
- Mobile Processing
- Mobile Processing is a Java sandbox for programming mobile phones. It is based on and shares the same design goals as the open source Processing project.