03 Oct

Posted at 10:27h in Blog, Boca Raton News, Education

How can Boca parents keep kids* informed about the changing world around them? 4boca.com has aggregated news headlines relevant specifically to the people of Boca Raton, updated daily. How can Boca parents connect their kids to the information about a changing planet without exposing them to the...

27 Feb

Posted at 13:01h in Blog, Boca Raton News, Community, Education
There's something that local parents need to know about the Parkland school shooting: the security cameras at the high school were not showing the cops who arrived a live feed. The video the cops were watching, what they believed to be a live feed for as long as the shooting occurred, was actually a feed that had a 20 minute delay. The events they were watching on the security system in the school administrator office had occurred 20 minutes before hand. As a parent this has me very worried about the condition and configuration of the security camera systems in our local schools.

23 Jul

Posted at 14:48h in Blog, Community, Education

Did you know about the Barefoot Mailmen? Imagine what life must have been like back then, with no roads - and the best way to travel up and down the coast was to walk the waterline of the beach. I've always wondered if James Hamilton crossed the...

18 May

Posted at 12:14h in Blog, Community, Education
I've been wanting to create a blog post about someone who represents an enormous part of what makes Boca Raton a special place to live: Mr. Gordon Gilbert. I feel particularly lucky because when I was a Park Ranger with the City of Boca Raton I was privileged to work the Saturday Morning Gumbo Limbo shift. That gave me opportunities to get to know Mr. Gilbert as a person.

17 Apr

Posted at 18:41h in Community, Education
Programming is a doorway to understanding. It's not just about learning how to make a computer program; it's allows the practice of logical and organizational thinking. Even if a learner doesn't become a computer programmer, there are many other lessons to take away. One of the benefits of growing up in Boca Raton during the dawn of personal computers was getting to be around the folks who pioneered it all. Many of us were fortunate enough to learn programming alongside these folks. The tools we had to learn programming are still around, but not as readily accessible as they used to be a few years ago. 64 bit operating systems have pretty much shut the door on older command-line tools like GWBASIC, the programming system that kids were learning on back in the eighties and nineties.