We’re all about teaching kids to code. It’s like giving them the biggest, best power tool you can imagine. Once they have a good grasp of it, they can make things that are way bigger than them, and they can reach people all over the world.
When I (Paul) was a professor at the University of Minnesota, I spent a lot of time teaching students from all different backgrounds how to code. I have three young kids of my own and I've tried all sorts of games and toys to get them started coding early. The problem is that all of the games and toys treat computers like abstract, black boxes. They overlook the fundamental, most amazing concept: how simple switches, connected together in clever ways, can do incredibly smart things.
We started designing Turing Tumble in 2015 to give kids a way to discover how computers work and to help them start coding and designing algorithms. We worked on Turing Tumble for two years, mostly on nights and weekends. We 3D printed prototypes of parts, created puzzles, and tested them out on our kids.
Once we had a good, working prototype, we wanted to make more copies of the game so others could play it, too, but the way we were making them (CNC milling), it would have cost over $1,000 per copy! To make affordable copies of the game, we needed to create injection molds. They cost a lot up front, but once you have them, it’s inexpensive to make plastic parts.
The Open GApps Project is an open-source effort to script the automatic generation of up-to-date Google Apps packages.
On OpenGApps.org you can find more information about the project effort and also pre-built Google Apps packages generated by the OpenGApps.org buildbot.
The linux-based open-source mobile operating system Android is not only the most popular mobile operating system in the world, it’s also on the way to becoming a proprietary operating system. How is that?
While the core operating system is still released as part of the Android Open Source Project, the majority of core apps are not. It gets worse: More and more libraries and APIs are only available on phones that run various Google apps pre-installed, effectively locking third-party apps to the Google ecosystem. For these reasons Android is described as being a “look but don’t touch” kind of open.
At this point, several popular open-source applications like the secure messenger Signal already require some of Google’s proprietary libraries to be installed. Increasing demand in the free software community in addition to severe problems in Google’s proprietary software discovered by the Android modding community, have led to the development of a free software clone of Google’s proprietary core libraries and applications - the microG Project was born.
Although most microG components are far from complete, users are amazed by the results. Free software users got extended application support, privacy-caring users can reduce or monitor data that is sent to Google and especially older phones can expect some battery life improvements. microG is not only used on real devices, but also replaces Google tools in test emulators and is even used in virtual mobile infrastructure.