That's an excellent idea. I'd be very interested in having this sort of help, and later passing it forward.
The actually app however seems to only run on one make of tablet (that I don't happen to own). I could be wrong, but it seems to me that most people'll be doing SICP exercises on a real computer, rather than a tablet. Why did you decide not to do, say, a webapp - or even to just assign the pairs and let them use whatever communication medium they have in common (skype, hangouts, IRC, whatever)?
Mostly because a tablet is very well suited to the whiteboard, and we find that the whiteboard _really_ helps for this kind of working collaboration.
It makes it really easy to gesture and discuss visually.
As far as iPad vs Android - that's just because we have to start somewhere. Also, I worked at Apple for 7 years, so it's definitely the environment I'm quickest at programming.
That said, if people actually like what we're doing, who knows. The main point is the conversation, the tech just enables it.
(Oh - and yeah, you definitely do the SICP exercises on the computer. That's by yourself, though. When we chat once a week, we do often write out snippets of code or problems, but the use of the interpreter already happened.)
Comments
That's an excellent idea. I'd be very interested in having this sort of help, and later passing it forward.
The actually app however seems to only run on one make of tablet (that I don't happen to own). I could be wrong, but it seems to me that most people'll be doing SICP exercises on a real computer, rather than a tablet. Why did you decide not to do, say, a webapp - or even to just assign the pairs and let them use whatever communication medium they have in common (skype, hangouts, IRC, whatever)?
Mostly because a tablet is very well suited to the whiteboard, and we find that the whiteboard _really_ helps for this kind of working collaboration.
It makes it really easy to gesture and discuss visually.
As far as iPad vs Android - that's just because we have to start somewhere. Also, I worked at Apple for 7 years, so it's definitely the environment I'm quickest at programming.
That said, if people actually like what we're doing, who knows. The main point is the conversation, the tech just enables it.
(Oh - and yeah, you definitely do the SICP exercises on the computer. That's by yourself, though. When we chat once a week, we do often write out snippets of code or problems, but the use of the interpreter already happened.)