It is frustrating watching all the Lego Mindstorms Developer Program weblogs. Many of them appear to be people who were randomly chosen to be in the program, and are now (apparently) maintaining weblogs about the robots they’re building.
So, I’ve realized that I could, after all, put my weblog to good use: I could write about some of the things I know, and are appropriate to the blog’s title. One is how students engage in the act of programming—I’ve written very little about my dissertation work over the past few years, and I might as well start serializing my research, results, and ideas out into this space. Certainly, it is a rare and hardy soul who would want to read my dissertation.
Likewise, I have spent years teaching with the LEGO Mindstorms in the classroom. I designed and taught my own course in the CS department at Indiana University Bloomington, and have continued using LEGO in my workings with students at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. I’ve even helped write a massively concurrent runtime for the LEGO Mindstorms, and have been a judge at two First LEGO League competitions now, but never mind that we weren’t selected to be part of the developer program. I’m not bitter. Much.
…
So. Purpose. Direction. These are good things. And it will help keep me from blathering on about things that don’t matter in this space. Like, um, Peeps. Erhm… yeah.
(Actually, Peep research seems pretty important. But I’ll let that go for now.)