[dublinben]

I loved this book as a kid. I'm sure it did something to inspire my wild imagination.

Unfortunately, I see technology as less inviting to young tinkering as it once was. The command line is obscured away in modern operating systems. Mobile devices are locked down, and impossible to create new programs with anyway. If this trend continues, I fear the programming will be less accessible to young people than ever before. In the UK, the number of students studying computer science is already dramatically down from its peak.

http://royalsociety.org/news/ict-computer-science/

[seanmcdirmid]

And yet, we have increasingly better robotic toolkits, Minecraft and LittleBigPlanet as popular video games, 3D printers, and so on. Its not all negative.