Great. I had read about it but wasn’t sure if it was a better option than Scratch for younger kids. Mine are 6 and 7 and I they use something similar to Scratch. Does anybody know if younger kids use Snap! ?
We have a few who've just shown up on their own, but my friend Paul Goldenberg (my own nominee for best educator) has a project using Snap! with second graders, not to teach programming but to teach mathematics using Snap!-based microworlds.
From memory, I believe it did. But since then I've taken up meditation which has had a much larger impact on my life, and so it's hard to tease apart which helps what, and to what degree.
The technique I learnt was at a 10-day silent retreat, of which we spent the first days (9-hours a day) exclusively on concentrating on respiration. With this new awareness, I realised, just in my day to day, and especially when I'm trying to focus, I sometimes forget to breathe. This is something I otherwise would not have noticed and not corrected. Also important to note that I used to have mild sleep apnoea, and I would always wake up feeling groggy from lack of oxygen. I haven't had a sleep study since I've started practicing, but I no longer wake up groggy, and now I can go to sleep within the hour instead of tossing and turning half the night.
I've noticed that yoga and meditation have also improved my breathing and form during exercise.
Know someone who had this issue, turned out to be related to sleep apnea. Their life totally changed after it was diagnosed and a CPAP was used during sleep.
I only had mild sleep apnoea (according to a sleep study). Meditation (maybe not yoga) did reduce symptoms for me, but there are many contributing factors, and for severe cases CPAP is often necessary. Based on my limited anecdata, I think meditation could help other reduce or manage their symptoms, and I strongly doubt it could be harmful.
There is documentary called General Magic which used old footage and interviews to describe their rise and fall. In one scene, Bill is said to have written a big chunk (don’t remember exactly what but I was in awe) of it very quickly. I saw it on a plane when browsing through Emirates’ catalogue.
Such a detailed answer. Thank you. Unlike you, I registered for an MRes. (Masters in Research) degree at a UK but found that due to lack of taught courses I couldn’t plug the holes in my mathematical foundations. For the very few courses that were taught, quality of teaching was also an issue which presumably wouldn’t be the case at a university like Cambridge. Even though I finished with honours, I am still left with the nagging feeling that I didn’t get what I wanted out of my effort.
Quality of teaching is a problem everywhere. Universities reward researchers, not teachers. There are very few who dedicate themselves to quality teaching. Also there didn't seem to be any courses at Cambridge geared towards grad studies (or remedial education, which is what I wanted, lol). The undergrad courses were themselves much tougher compared to their US counterparts and very math-oriented.
I recall sitting through a denotational semantics course and the students (all of 18 years old) were asking apparently relevant questions, and the prof (Glynn Wynskel) would say, 'that's a good question'. And I'm sitting at the back of the class awed at this spectacle! I'm wondering what was in this kid's background that prepared him better than me for this course. I have written a compiler, dammit, and I have 20 years of experience. The odds are that I should have heard something in those 20 years that left me marginally better prepared. But no. Here I am, understanding neither the question nor the answer!
It is only in my third year that it clicked. It was just a resistance to formal math, a resistance I had no idea I had. Once I got over it, and I was able to treat math notation as a compact way of writing it out, I started having a good time.
I have a suspicion that quality teaching alone would not have solved your nagging feeling. You need soak time. I am convinced that the 1-year masters programs in the UK (and increasingly so in the US) are a scam. They are only good for the uni to make money, but the students are shafted.
Badly written my side: show them svg in web, but reimplemented the high level constructs using python PPTX equivalents, not svg embedded. I am told svg is coming. (To ppt) and would love to have it.
