Recent Posts
What is KPL?
KPL stands for Kid’s Programming Language. KPL makes it easy for kids to learn computer programming. KPL makes it fun, too, by making it especially easy to program computer games, with cool graphics and sound.
Can I learn to program?
If you are using a computer to read this on the Web, you can certainly learn to program! Programming is really good exercise for your brain, too. The skills you already have that you will let you learn to program are reading and typing and math. As you learn to program with KPL, you will also learn something called ‘computer logic.’
A computer program is simply a series of instructions to the computer. Computers are very good at following instructions, but they must be told what to do very precisely, and using logic that the computer understands. When you learn KPL, you are learning how to do that. When you learn KPL, you are learning how to make a computer do anything you want it to do – including play games!
KPL is for games?
We invented KPL because we think learning is best when learning is fun. And the whole point of games is fun, of course! It’s also true that playing games is the thing that computers are used for more than anything else in the world. Computer graphics and computer sound make for some very fun games!
Because we were thinking about these things, we designed KPL to make it easy to program computer games. So it’s easy for you to make computer games yourself! KPL is not only for programming games – it’s for learning other things, too. But learning is best when learning is fun, right?
Show me some games!
KPL comes with several games, some of which we will show you below. Note that these are games you can play, but that they are also KPL programs which you can read, learn from, and change. The idea is for you to make your own games – but these fun examples will help you do that!
This year's Hugo-nominated short stories as free podcasts
Escape Pod -- the excellent science fiction short-story podcast -- is podcasting four of the five stories on the Hugo Award's short fiction ballot, starting this week. All free, under a Creative Commons license!
RadRails is an integrated development environment for the Ruby on Rails framework. The goal of this project is to provide Rails developers with everything they need to develop, manage, test and deploy their applications. Features include source control, debugging, WEBrick servers, generator wizards, syntax highlighting, data tools and much much more.
The RadRails IDE is built on the Eclipse RCP, and includes the Subclipse plug-in and the RDT plug-ins. The RadRails tools are also available as Eclipse plug-ins.
Project Gutenberg makes audio eBooks available for some of the same great literature available in plain text. Thanks to Mike Eschman for most computer-generated eBooks, to AudioBooksForFree.com for our Arthur Conan Doyle series of human readings, and to LiteralSystems.org for work on new readings by volunteers. We are also working with Librivox, with a similar effort to get people volunteering to read. Please consider joining them!
Our listings are divided into two categories. We are still adding new audio eBooks read by people, primarily through work by LiteralSystems.org and Librivox. However, we have stopped adding computer-generated eBooks. Instead, we are working on methods to automatically make computer-generated eBooks on demand (that is, by choosing options, then getting the file within a short time).