KWLUG Meeting: Monday, October 7 2013, 7pm

Would you like to learn programming, but worry about starting from
scratch? Perhaps you know a young person who would like to program,
but whose typing skills are not yet up to scratch?

Is the desire to create easy, interactive animations an itch you would like to scratch? Or perhaps you have been possessed by Old Scratch? If so (or even if not) then you might be interested in this month's KWLUG presentation. Raul Suarez will introduce us to Scratch, a graphical, introductory programming language designed for children, but usable by anybody. Scratch makes it easy to incorporate animations, graphics and sound into projects. The language allows programmers to piece together program flow constructs (if statements, loops...) by piecing together graphical units. Raul will show us the programming environment, and scratch beneath the surface to demonstrate some interesting programs. He invites our younger KWLUG members (seven years older and up) to attend, with appropriate adult supervision.

In other news, the planning bureaucracy at KWLUG world headquarters is getting anxious, because they still have empty slots for meetings that are quickly approaching. There are still presentation slots available for November (a 40-minute half slot) and December (a full slot, or two half slots). Do you have a topic you would like to share with the KWLUG community? Would you like to help some faceless bureaucrats sleep easier at night? Then get in touch and make a presentation pitch!

In other other news, the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo is putting on a neat series of talks related to privacy and computer security. The first one is scheduled for October 8, and is entitled "Why Should You Care About Security and Privacy". For more information, check out the CSC events listings: http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/events/

* * *
This presentation will be beginner-friendly. He writes:

Remember when you started to program? The pleasure of the instant gratification.
Do you want to share that high with a new generation? Expose them to Scratch. Scratch is a visual language born at the MIT, from the same roots as the now defunct App Inventor.

From sequential instructions to conditionals and loops in an event driven environment, the "programmer" gets instant gratification of watching things happening in the screen.

NOTE: Scratch is cross platform FLOSS, so non-Linux users can go home and play with it too!

Raul invites children 8 years old and up (maybe precocious 7 year olds) to attend this presentation as well (accompanied by an adult, please).

* * *

The host for this meeting was acant.