[erlang-questions] erlang and Kara

[Ulf Wiger (TN/EAB)]

I subscribe to press releases from the Swedish Government
(that's a lot of press releases), and one of the most
recent ones was a non-committal promise to work extra
hard to increase the number of women in the IT sector.
The simple reasoning being that, since there's a shortage
of IT expertise, it doesn't make sense to recruit from
(mainly) only half the population.

Naturally, I thought about the excellent presentation
at the Erlang workshop in Freiburg, where Frank Huch
talked about using Kara and Ladybugs to teach high-school
girls programming.

Here are the slides, and a paper, which are perhaps not as
fun as the interactive session in Freiburg was:

http://www.erlang.se/workshop/2007/proceedings/12huch.pdf
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1300000/1292534/p93-huch.pdf?key1=1292534&key2=5682344911&coll=GUIDE&dl=&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618

Quote:
"After three days programming with Kara, we introduce Erlang’s
features for concurrent and distributed programming to the pupils,
which usually results in an 'Oh, what a pity!', when telling them
that we do not program with Kara anymore."

Then, the students go on to implement a chat system.
Recall that these are high-school students with no
previous programming experience.


There was a lot of interest at the workshop in seeing
Kara released as an Open Source project. Has anything
happened with that?

Maybe one could even get a research grant for adopting
Kara to Swedish education...?



I guess we should start learning to say "ladybug" in lots
of different languages:  (:

German  : Marienkäfer
Swedish : nyckelpiga
Spanish : mariquita
French  : coccinelle
Italian : coccinella
Dutch   : Het lieveheersbeestje
Japanese: tentoumushi (*)

Corrections are welcome (probably also necessary).

(*) "ladybug" translated on-line to Kanji, then transliterated
on-line to Romanji. At least, this translates back to "ladybug"
in a romanji-to-English on-line translation."

BR,
Ulf W