The Fundamental Little Hackers' Summit

One month left until the little, budget, low-key conference that no one’s ever heard of! Small as it is, though, this is a big deal for Hacker’s Ed. The first time we’ve had our own conference. The creators of Processing, bits of the Alice and Scratch teams. My sources say you’re talking in the vicinity of a hundred bucks for out-of-towners. Discounts for young folks. And locals moreso.

The thing will go roughly like this:

• Saturday – each team gets their own room to show you how to hack, both morning and afternoon. Like five hours in all. These will be workshops. Bring your laptop. You can concentrate on one tool or you can float around.
• Sunday – everybody’s together and you’ll see fourty-five minute showcases of each tool. And some general discussion about what kind of ideals we’re all trying to espouse.
• Monday – again, workshops. Local school kids come in on these days and the classes will be very basic.

This whole conference was cooked up Golan Levin. If you have no idea who that is, that’s probably my fault. I should have posted this awhile ago. Seriously, what a fantastic sort of fellow.

Lovely sentiment from the motivation:

Recently, a number of projects dedicated to democratizing the education of computational thinking have coalesced. Emerging primarily from the arts sector, a set of new programming environments (and accompanying pedagogic techniques) have been developed by artists, and for artists, that help regular folks and other non-computer-scientists learn to program. Using visual and musical expression as the “hook”, thousands of people have not only learned to code using these new environments, but found new reasons to code in the first place. These environments — many of which are free, open-source initiatives — have made enormous inroads towards expanding the computational abilities and interests of hundreds of thousands of creative people worldwide. You too can join this movement!

Kind of like a cross-language community, yeah? Imagine that.