Bret Victor wrote an essay in 2012 that left me desperately wishing I were a computer engineer. “Learnable Programming” was a critique of 1) Khan Academy’s newly released intro course on programming, 2) the Processing language the course focused on, and 3) decades of stagnation in programming pedagogy. The essay was funny, visually stunning, provocative,… Read more »
Posts Categorized: computing
How I Crashed Two School Networks in Two Days: A Cautionary Tale
Back in September, I was sitting in a collaborative planning session with my principal and my department chair when an assistant principal stuck her head in the room and asked to speak to me outside. With her stood our technology coordinator. They showed me a piece of paper with the name of a wireless network… Read more »
“Little Brother” is Magic
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow My rating: 5 of 5 stars From time to time growing up, my dad has said something that’s been on my mind a lot recently: “Technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” This is a book about the dark side of technological magic, and how the greatest wizards… Read more »
Start Me Up: Dispatch from Startup Weekend Washington DC EDU
Over the weekend, I had the privilege to attend a portion of the second Startup Weekend event focused on education. Startup Weekend is itself a startup organization that organizes gatherings of developers, designers, business and marketing experts, and investors to build startup companies in a single weekend. This year, the organization began a series of… Read more »
Hi, I'm Andrew Plemmons Pratt. I am the Program Manager for New Classrooms in Washington, DC. (Though opinions expressed on this site are entirely my own.) I taught 7th-grade English in Prince George’s County, Maryland as a member of the 2010 Teach For America corps. I write about literacy & edtech here—along with stuff like industrial archeology and bread baking.