Well after a month of nearly solid work writing, rewriting, coding, testing, and designing…. I’m beyond excited to announce that the Mystery Island Coding Quest Hour of Code Tutorial is now live! I can’t say it was an easy experience. After writing the script for the activities and coding them up, I had my children and husband do the entire thing. The feedback wasn’t all that pretty! Caramba. I spent another 2 weeks redoing the activities, making the student work a bit harder to figure things out, adding better feeedback, and finally creating all of the English audio myself. They all seemed to really like the new version, gracias a Dios… I am still working on a pretty awesome Printable activity where kids can do the activities offline or “unplugged” by cutting out the blocks and pasting them into the activity page. I am also doing a Teacher’s Guide, and hopefully will get around to adding a chart of Common Core and NextGen standards.

Whether we’ll be featured by Code.org remains to be seen, but I’m really proud of the work, and plan to keep revising and improving the entire thing, especially as we get more input from outside about things that could be better. We are also thinking of launching and IndieGoGo campaign to help get a bit of funding for development, and will be working with the media and schools locally to help promote the Alaskan Hour of Code. Click here to select your language and do the Mystery Island Coding Quest!

We have finally put the Monster Coding app online! Please beware, we are still very much in the alpha stage, as I’ve been reworking things like loading order, as well as concatenating files, which can sometimes lead to unpredicted glitches. I had hoped to keep the initial load time as skinny as possible, but in an app that requires 3 or 4MB for the full data and app to load, concatenating and minifying is about the best I can do. I am looking to GZIP as well, as I know Amazon’s Cloudfront supports that, I’ve just never done it before. Also, I’ve been doing mostly mobile app development in recent years, and haven’t had to pay much attention to SEO. Looks like there are all kinds of weird new tags to worry about, as well as dealing with outputting HTML pages just for the crawlers, as both the website and the app for Monster Coding are Javascript Template based, using Backbone.js and Dust.js.

I will be redoing all of the English audio hopefully this week, as I begin writing our Hour of Code tutorial. Right now there are only a few lessons online: the Background, Scale, Pixels, and Random, along with just 2 keyboarding activities. I have more keyboarding and a new Math section that I will put up as soon as I finish the Hour of Code tutorial. The deadline is Oct 1, so I’d like to be done with the tutorial well before that date. You’ll find it here live as soon as I have it done! I’ll be adding a Contact Us form soon too, so people can send us inquiries and suggestions. Overall a very exciting week for Monster Coding.

I had either the good or bad fortune to have run out of bandwidth in our home plan this week, as here in Alaska the plans are not unlimited. When that happens, they slow you down to a trickle, until your billing month begins again. As a result, I was able to see just how miserably slow a 2MB plus web app loads for somebody without high speed internet! Watching a white screen for eons before you even get a preloader is no fun. So I realized I need to change the way the website and app load, as it’s important that our app be accessible to kids around the world who may not have access to high speed internet. I placed an SVG graphic inline, as well as a pure CSS preloader, with all of the style information in the HTML header. I normally never do that, as having a clean separation of HTML, JS, and CSS has always seemed so much nicer… But that leaves your users staring at a white screen while your assets load, and for a big e-learning app like ours, the wait is unbearable. In fact I think a lot of folks would just assume the site was broken before waiting 60 plus seconds for some visual indication that the site is loading.

I also load script.js in the header, then I use that to load my files in a staggered manner so they load in the correct order for dependencies, and it gives me the ability to update the preloading indicator after each batch is done. I do also use head.js, as script.js can’t handle CSS files. I asynchronously load the CSS and a big data file while the other stuff begins loading, and then after all of the necessary files are dong, I load the actual app file, and update my preloader to its final position. I’d like to add catchy phrases or speech bubbles telling about our app, but I’m too lazy to do that in 8 languages right now ! I still need to make the web app more responsive as well, as testing on the 24 inch iMac shows me some areas that need improvement, and some scroll bars that need adding. I develop on a touch screen hybrid PC, so I forget that people using a mouse need those scroll bars. I was delighted to see that our app will load in Kindle’s Silk browser, but I have a lot of responsive fixes to make before we will be truly compatible with Kindle. Coming soon however!

Our house has always been full of tablets. Since I began doing app development some 4 years ago, we began accumulating devices: iPad, Sony tablet and clamshell tablet, Nook, Dell Venue and Samsung Windows 8 tablets, 2 Android phones, and now the Kindle Fire 7 HD. That is a lot of tablets for any house, I know. Most of the devices go unused most of the time, and some are tucked away in a closet somewhere. But I have had a lot of opportunity to see how our family uses these devices. Our old iPad 2 is still getting a lot of play, but it has begun to seem like a big thing to lug around. I think it’s 10.1 inches, although I am not completly sure about that. For apps like Code.org and especially StoryboardThat.com, the iPad’s screen is still too small, however. But for Raz Kids, Dreambox, and SmartyAnts, it’s been perfect. None of the other devices have been used much for learning around here, as the 24 inch iMac is way more alluring to the kids for most stuff. The Dell Venue Pro has come in handy for using Nessy (still Flash based, reading and math) - but hasn’t been used by the kids for much else.

When we got the Kindle Fire 4th Generation 7 HD last Christmas, I thought it was too small, too toyish, and had a cobbled OS that limited what you could do with it. The idea that I couldn’t run regular Android apps OR Flash seemed really lame to me. My son installed some fun games into the Free Time section, and used it once every couple of weeks for a while, until the thing went onto a shelf along with all of the other tablets gathering dust. But when we were trying to figure out the best way to use our extra 24 inch Dell monitor to set my son up a new workstation, it was actually Nana who suggested that maybe the Kindle could work. The Dell Venue was my first thought, but unbelievably Dell didn’t add HDMI capability to the mini USB port, so you have to spend some $85 on your $200 tablet in order to get an external monitor working. Uh, no thanks. So I thought again about the Kindle, and picked the thing up to see what it offered. To my surprise it is darn snappy. Surfs the web as fast as anything around here, and loads all the apps quickly as well. But the thing that really blew me away was once I began really using the Books feature. The 7 inch size is PERFECT for reading, compared to a much clunkier experience with an 8 or 10 inch device. But it’s the ease with which you can find and download books, as well as the audio immersion feature where you can choose to download the audiobook for about $5, in some cases for free - that is really amazing, and makes book reading a way better experience for my kids.
You can make the font size way bigger than regular, which is another huge bonus, as small fonts are the root of much online evil, lol. Then I began downloading some other key apps: Rosetta Stone, Duo Lingo, Brain Pop and Brain Pop Jr., Front Row Math, and Raz Kids. All run beautifully on the Kindle. Fast, not too small, and with great sounding audio. Ah I forgot to mention that on the sly I turned my son’s Kindle into my own late night TV show watching device! I like to watch a show occasionally, mindless fun shows like The Last Ship, Tyrant, and a couple others. I’ve always used my Samsung S5, but lately it has seemed like an awfully small screen. Getting older I guess, eyes don’t work like they used to… But after installing Hulu and the TNT app (which runs terribly on my phone), I was amazed at how much better the viewing experience was on the Kindle. Also, the TNT app runs beautifully.
My only complaint about our Kindle Fire 7 HD is the space problem: it gives us only about 5GB of usable space, even though it is supposed to have 8, for some reason a lot of that is not accessible. Our latest Kindle was ordered with 16GB for just $20 more, which is surely worth it. But with all of the Cloud based stuff you can use, and the videos you can stream as opposed to downloading (not sure if iPad still forces you to download everything, which is hideous…). Overall the Kindle Fire is a FANTASTIC family and education device, and kills the desire for a new iPad or an iPad mini. I wouldn’t want to not have any access to the sweet apps still not available for anything but IOS devices….but for our daily use, the Kindle is getting a lot more play. And since Jeff Bezos seems determined to take over the world I’m confident the Kindle will keep getting better and better!

My intention as the school year began was to get a touchscreen laptop for each kid. But as I began looking at the lower end ones that would fit for children, I realized that our 24 inch iMac is actually much better for most of the webapps they use, and their iPad and Kindle Fire tablets are good for everything else. Since we have an extra 24 inch monitor laying around as well as an additional blue tooth keyboard, I wondered why I couldn’t just set up a 2nd workstation for my son using his Kindle Fire, with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

So I ordered the HDMI adapter from Amazon, as well as a cable for it to connect to the monitor. Seems like a pain to me that you have to order both instead of just 1 super adapater thingy, but I did what the Amazon forums told me I had to do. When the Kindle Fire 7 HD 4th Generation first arrived as a gift from a relative, I thought the thing seemed a bit like a toy. The OS seemed chopped off at the kneees, and I wondered what the thing would be good for other than watching some videos and doing a couple of game style apps. But it turns out the thing is quite snappy - it surfs the web darn fast, and has most of the apps I wanted him to have, as well as running any webapp that doesn’t rely on Flash. Poor Flash, all those years of service only to be stamped out! Our cable should be here soon, and I’ll have to update whether you can really set up a basic workstation with your Kindle. Printing is a bit weird, via some HP app, but I’m hopeful that the learning apps will perform great.