MakerSquare Day 11: If you don't ask, you don't get (3/3)

Today's theme is basically the title.

And it all started with cereal.

See, in classic tech-company style, MakerSquare has a little kitchen with some snacks stocked by the company, including my favorite, Honey Nut Cheerios. (Consider this a plug, and, if you work for General Mills, feel free to send me cereal.) There's milk too, but, gasp!, it's regular cow's milk, which I am allergic to or intolerant to or scared of. (Whichever you prefer.)

So today, after looking at the cereal for two days, I sent an email to someone in the organization asking if we could get soy milk. And instead of telling me I'm a prima donna (which is true), she said, "sure!"

Which goes to show the truth of that old saw: If you don't ask, you don't get.

And that brings me to the structure of MakerSquare, which is very student-centered and student-led in a way. For instance, today, we spent some part of the morning talking about mentorship and about being clear about what you want from your mentor. Then, in the afternoon, we talked about CSS by all coding up a little web page together, with the students offering suggestions on what they'd want to see and then everyone--including the instructor as the final arbiter--figuring out how to write the HTML and CSS to get that.

The rest of my notes for today are all super specific CSS comments, so I'll leave you with the note that I am still terrible at ping pong, but that our master ping pong player just gave me a little lesson.

(Yes, this is tagged "Sinatra" and "Songify" because we spent time doing that, though I didn't have much to say.)

MakerSquare Day 10: "Hacky" means something different here (3/2)

From listening to lots of Marc Maron's podcast over the last few years, I've gotten into the habit of referring to jokes as "hacky" when they are too easy, too lazy, too unoriginal. Making a joke about how dumb blondes are--how strict Germans are--how anything any group of people are--all of that could qualify as hacky. (In case you're wondering, from my very limited experience, cruise-ship comedy is often hacky.)

But here, in programming world (which you could image as "Programming World," with a big fun banner over the gate and rides like "It's a Small Loop After All" and the "Hall of Control Flows"), "hacky" means something different. It means something like "ugly" and "ad hoc." In comedy, something is hacky because it's old. In programming, something might be hacky because it's a new, ugly fix to a problem.

And today's problems to fix all revolved around HTML and CSS. Because today we got a big heap of info on website design. All about classes and IDs and how to use the Google Chrome Developer Tools to break websites.

(So, if I send you a picture of the New York Times website with your name in a headline title, well, then either I've been playing around--or they've finally caught up with you for what you did. You know. Don't make me say it.)

Today was also the day when we asked, if you had 100 cats in a row, and either gave a cat a hat or took away the hat you gave every time you stopped at that cat, and if you stopped at every cat the first time through--and then every other cat the second time through--and then every third cat the third time through...

Surprise: the answer is squares of numbers. I did it by hand from 1 to 9 and then my old high school math class kicked in. Of course (my math theory teacher Mr. T. would say), any cat you visit an even number of times won't have a hat; and the only cats you'll visit an odd number of times are those squares. (Like that cat at 36 gets visited at 1 and 36; 2 and 18; 3 and 12; 4 and 9; and... 6. Give that kitty a hat.)

Another big take away from today: the Space Jam website is still up.