Lauren Ipsum
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Alex Chaffee
Feb 28, 2012, 8:04:02 PM2/28/12
to railsbridg...@googlegroups.com, test-first-teaching
I'm about halfway through Lauren Ipsum by Carlos Bueno and I love it. It's a playful romp in the tradition of Flatland, Alice in Wonderland and Gödel Escher Bach, only this time the mathematical fantasy land is filled with personified concepts from computer science. It's written for children (aka young adults) but it's got enough wordplay and inside jokes to keep an adult entertained. (Seriously, I heard my mom guffaw from the other room while she browsed it over breakfast this morning.)
And in a nice Railsbridge tie-in, the main character -- like Alice and Ada -- is a young woman. She starts out a bit insecure but learns to overcome the Jargons (not to mention General Case and Bruto Fuerze) and figures out how to solve problems with pluck, creativity, and elegant algorithms.
It's apparently self-published -- the author is an engineer at Facebook, and was a Kickstarter project. More at http://www.laurenipsum.org/ and http://carlos.bueno.org/2012/02/bots-seized-control.html and hey Sarah, check out http://www.laurenipsum.org/tinkerpad/p2slxEx (though it's apparently more buggy than turtley at the moment) -- I want to do a test-first teaching class using Tinker's Turtle language! (Also maybe I should write a longer review for the Railsbridge blog.)
- A
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