My children’s book on technology raised 100k within 24 hours – here’s how(lindaliukas.tumblr.com) |
My children’s book on technology raised 100k within 24 hours – here’s how(lindaliukas.tumblr.com) |
I think this project did well for a few key reasons:
1) STEM, STEM, STEM and code, code, code. The timing is right. Look at all the coverage this got in big mainstream media publications. Here is a project to help your child get into programming at a young age. 2) There is a need for introducing programming to children in an accessible way. There is some stuff on the market, but not that much, and this might be the first centered around a colorful children's book. I also think this is more approachable for parents too. A cold, clinical textbook would scare off many parents. 3) Linda is attractive, bubbly and non-American (on a heavily American site). This never hurts with crowdfunding. The fact that she is female in a heavy male-dominated space helps too. I can't fault her at all for this, and why not harness it?
I hope it turns out well and that this is just the beginning for Linda and her books. I'm excited to read it with my future child.
4) Linda is a co-founder of Rails Girls.
? Free publicity always helps. I'm not sure how Rails Girls is popular in the US, but considering we have it in Slovenia, I'd say it's pretty successful.
It's pretty wonderful.
But I also want to say that I have some feedback for the video. I just thought there was too much "smiles". I don't know how to put it: but it's strange and weird to see someone posting a video of her smiling like literally every few seconds, throwing things every minute or so. A bit formal will be great.
There was too many moving. Scenes were constantly changing while the speech was on-going. It was hard to concentrate, pay attention to the dialogue and the animation at the same time. The main point wasn't delivered/pitched to me right away. I wasn't too sure what exactly would go into the book and how parents/mentors can help guide the kids in general from the video. Essentially, an ad that changes scene every 1 second is going to hurt viewers.
Here is another project (which I backed too), I am not trying to promote it (but putting out here is guilty of promoting it). Check wongfuproduction movie fundraising video on Youtube. That was a lot easier to grasp.
Just my 3 cents. Good luck.
To play Devils Advocate, the video was not intended for children. Unless even the kids in the Bay have their hands on fat stacks of cash.
What would have been much more effective for me was videos of kids actually working their way through the materials. Lots of potential for visual appeal and warm fuzzies, but practical and on point.
Americans will also laugh right up in your face; if they cover a laugh, that's considered rude and condescending. Cultures differ.
For a long time I wrote off the idea of having a blog because it seemed vain. I don't usually have any great ideas that anyone else needs to know about, and my trials of learning new things are just the same as everyone else's. However, over the past few months I've realized that I was dead wrong. Watching a few good series of blogs like [1] and [2] has shown me that even if you don't have anything world shattering it is still great as a means to make learning more important. After all, you can't let down your readers, can you?
[1] http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/09/26/hacker-school-day-4-c-unit-te...
This advice is golden, and it's pretty cool to see such joy, enthusiasm, and generosity rewarded.
Bonus points if you can get Samuel Jackson to narrate it.
Most startups have a coding conventions guide for new hires -- and in my experience, it's a dry and tedious thing to study.
It would be funny and interesting to engage new programmers with animated horror stories instead of just: "Braces go on the next line...and please sanitize your data."
This book is a neat idea and the illustrations look cool, but here is one concern: Why name the main character Ruby? Good kids books are timeless and ruby the programming language is not, and it dates the book too. Why associate any programming language in particular with programming concepts like sequences or sets? That seems like a message from "learn to code" school. So does DRY to a lesser extent.
http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Featuring-Profound-Object-Orien...
He lives in a seemingly boring world, but it isn't boring after all. It may not even be a world after all. He invents solutions using the contrived rules i.e. using a purple crayon. Some of the solutions become problems. For example the dragon scares him and makes his hand shake, so he falls into the water, but he comes up thinking fast and makes a sailboat.
Both these lines remind me of computers or programming:
Nine identical pieces of pie that Harold likes best.
A forest with just one tree in it.
Also word play is important in programming and in HATPK.
Lots of things are more like programming than things obviously designated that way such as programming languages. In Hoare's communicating sequential processes he goes on and on about vending machines for example.
It really helps your sales pitch for a whimsical and fun book when you are attractive and have a cute smile that seems full of joy.
I find it hard to explain the fundraising which went way over the goal, without including gender into equation. Anyway – a pink-colored children's book about tech stuff, written by girls, sounds comforting in every way.
I plan on using this both for my own enjoyment, and sharing it with a soon-to-be five year old boy who will be absolutely in love with the little animal/Android characters.
I'm toward the end of a rough patch financially, and usually pass up supporting projects on Kickstarter for this reason... But I couldn't resist, and ordered the double package.
Congratulations on the extreme success, Linda! I hope you find the process enjoyable enough to continue the series for years to come. I also hope the app or even a little indie game will be possible to create in the future (I realize it won't reach the $500k goal.)
As a final note - I just thought of the possibilities of this being implemented in a classroom!
Years ago, I was a guest at my son's kindergarten's career day and I showed the kids how I could move around a cartoon mouse with Scratch. I'm not a great presenter or teacher, but the entire class, boys and girls, was completely engaged. They were tossing out suggestions and laughing and I'm convinced they "got" the basics. It was incredibly rewarding.
Yes, totally agree software is "literacy 2.0". And yes, of course, we need pre-school books on software. I had weird books teaching me BASIC without putting it into context - and context not ability has been where I have missed opportunities or regreted actions.
So I applaud Linda for her insights, hope her world view is one I want my daughter to take into the 21 C, and look forward to seeing my copy at the end of the year.
Poorly written software has cost lives. Of course, the vast majority of software devs work on CRUD apps, but increasing this pool will only make it more probable that a huge number of people not well versed in logical skills will be building critical software.
Question: Why are we not doing the same thing for the medical profession? Do we say medicine is the literacy 2.0?
But we teach comprehension through literacy, and we will have to teach coding the same way.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/women-outnumber-men-for-the...
Now that I see it turned into a write up like this, I can't help but wonder if those criticizing the project for its intentions were correct.
If you do not have the early adopters who will also help you spread the word to secondary adopters, you are SOL.
There have been countless posts on HN where the author has made some amazing sales on e-book, SaaS MVP, apps, other software, and so on.
In pretty much all those cases, they already had some sort of community/e-mail list to kickstart(ahem) the sales.
I want to teach my kids (4,2) how to program, if this is a more accessible way, it's worth my money.
Minor quibble for sure.
My girlfriend is Swedish-Finn and she was the one who insisted.
If you didn't grow up in Finland, have you at least been back to visit? Helsinki is such a great city.
Ruby and Snow Leopard? Really? This book will be completely useless in 5 years when technologies change. She should have wrote about basic CS principles instead. But I guess most of the women just cannot think logically. And that's probably why there are so few women in tech...
I've found individual blog posts, linked to from sites like HN or found in web searches, to be greatly helpful, but often when I go to a blog like one of those that you shared here, and try to start reading it from the top, it feels disorganized; the content isn't presented in any ordering that necessarily makes good pedagogical sense.
The best solutions I've seen for this are a) organized post series (e.g., [1]) and posts that aggregate a bunch of things previously written (e.g. [2]). I'd like to see people take that further, so if people have other examples of interesting approaches, I'd love it if they could reply with them.
I will say that editorial work is hard. As I've experimented with writing a book, it's clear to me that whatever I think the plan is up front, it's going to change, and that refactoring the structure as I go is expensive. It's cheaper to do it in large batches. So I think most blogs will just always suck in this regard. I suspect the future is in collaboration, where the author and blog readers can collectively build and maintain the table of contents and intro material. That would mirror the writer/editor collaboration that goes into books.
[1] http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-u... [2] This is only an ok-ish example, but it's the only one I could think of: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2014/02/04/how-to-get-p...
I consider the blog to be good writing practice, and if/when the time comes where a job I am pursuing requires some extensive writing experience, at the very least I will have a small body of work to show off.
There are three types of people who funded this project:
1) People who were really interested in the book.
2) People who saw a woman and thought funding it would be right thing to encourage and lessen the gender divide.
3) People who saw a pretty girl and wanted to please.
I honestly don't believe the third type of people were responsible for the majority of funding. Why? Simple, most of them would have tried to get in touch with her by now and since its not a pleasant experience getting creepy messages from strangers, had it happened, it would have been mentioned on her blogpost.
The reasons why I din't fund?
I was turned off by the marketing video. She was being unnecessarily flirtatious/kiddish with the camera. Not even once did they show an actual kid in the whole video, let alone trying to get them to learn from it.
I din't have a need for the product, or it wasn't appealing enough to have it for my nephew and niece.
Many parents are extremely hesitant to put pictures of their children online. If you're concerned, ask about it – a testimonial, note, etc. might be more within her comfort zone.
1) Keep that shit to yourself
2) Don't attribute your perverse motives to others
Thank you for calling him out.
http://www.math.sjsu.edu/~swann/mcsqrd.html
I didn't understand the mathematics, but I thought the cartoon characters were delightful. They made me want to learn math, and I could hardly wait until getting to calculus myself, so I could actually understand the book.
I watched the entire video and not a single sexual thought came out out it, far from it, just the thought that it could be useful for my kids.
I found also very interesting how she frame adding publicity of her cause in HN as useful advice, because it is useful advice!!. I have a company on my own so I know a little about marketting.
why is this even top comment.
So, I suggest a more constructive response for you if you think she's wrong and don't like her style: have a look around: what can you do to make things better?
I DO agree with the cringe-factor, though. I really didn't like watching her adjust her purple knit slippers, giggle and fluff her hair, etc.. It was like watching any other advertisement involving models which I don't like either and is one of the reasons I don't watch television.
I also didn't like her trying to increase the aura for her work by saying, "My country is also where Linux and IRC, etc." came from. There's probably a logical fallacy for that :)
Just like all bad art though, there is almost always information to be gained in the layer of meta-communication. Obviously, many people respond to this kind of stimulus. Perhaps it is because there isn't enough "cute" out there in the world already? It is my belief that cuteness and happy feelings should be more widely distributed, not just reserved for celebrities.
But even this morning on NPR (don't usually listen, was in a rush), I heard them announce the birthday of a celebrity.
We are in a celebrity culture that believes in foregoing our own happiness in exchange for concentrating wealth and happiness on certain other people. We are schizophrenic in that we pay money for impressions of the happiness that others experience. Is it made worse by the fact that we don't even care if celebrity's happiness is authentic or not, we still pay for the illusion.
Exactly the opposite. There's plenty of "cute" and that's also the reason why: people buy it.
A lot of what we learn today in technology specifics changes frequently - it's the thought process behind our execution and methodologies to build that is the most valuable.
I don't really care enough to ask(email) about it but it is really unusual to see a product targeted for children being marketed by a flirtatious woman (or mom?) instead of showing actual kids using it. I would find it similarly unusual if I were to see an ad on TV for a kid's toy without any kids in them.
Still though, I'm curious if she's done any product-market fit?
We can be brutally honest and say that yes, having women who share our passions (and workplaces) would be good for the personal lives of many developers. But I don't think there's any advocate for more women in the industry who would see that as anything but a fringe benefit.
I am so not seeing this.
No it wasn't. It is whimsical and youthful, which fits with the theme of making a book for children. Attributing that personality type with flirtation is disturbing and misogynistic.
> It had the same sexualized energy of a Disney movie about Tank Girl starring Bjork with the sound track by Blonde Redhead.
Projecting much?
> It was way to over the top.
I find your sexist crap over the top.
Please, stop being so damn creepy and/or supporting people who are so damn creepy. This community doesn't have to be such a hostile place.
So, I get what you're trying to say, but this is a tough one. Because, Linda did play up as a flirtatious girly girl in the promo video. Seriously, just watch the video: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lindaliukas/hello-ruby - and imagine if it was a man doing all of those things. Very strange, right? She's not behaving like a mature adult, she's got her shoes on the sofa... she's sitting in a clearly uncomfortable way... and I have to sit through a video in which I have to watch her fix her cute shoes? Why? Why not feature some kids in a promo video doing kiddy things, if she was going for the kiddy vibe? The flirtatious vibe that she instead chose to force in that video was very unnecessary in my opinion. So, paradoxically, it's Linda that's reducing women to sexual objects if she feels she has to behave in that way in order to sell up some books.
Does someone need to be in a burqa and talk in a monotone to keep the creeps from being creepy? How narrow a range of expression do you want for women before you start to make their objectification their fault?
If you're not picking up on the flirtatious undertones, if you have no problem with that kind of unprofessional presentation, it's not me who has some serious issues, it's you.
Also, I'd rather have my kids focus less on trying hard with clothes and looks and more on the more substantive things in life. The focus in that video simply should not have been on Linda and her awesome persona. But it was. I wish I didn't have to sit through Linda fixing her shoe-socks, but it was in the video, I watched it. It was peculiar.
I totally find her gestures and the shots pretentious. I believe that's a part of her sales pitch but it didn't have to be, because the book idea is already good enough to sell.
This video was a toned down version of SBV with a grown woman acting childish and coy, my hyperbolic statement tapped into other performers who utilize the same mechanic. It is not whimsical and youthful, it is offensive. She was selling herself rather than her art. I don't need to look at her knitted socks, watch her fluff her hair or jump on the damn couch. It is manipulative. Recognizing that manipulation is not sexist, on the contrary.
This video would have been way more mature if it showed children engaging with the content, rather than an artful selfie. We need to see how she explains ideas that lead children to a scientific mind.
Not only are you blaming the creator for your own sexualized interpretation of the kickstarter vid, but you claim that non-sexual behaviors are evidence of sexualized flirting.
> This video would have been way more mature if it showed children engaging with the content, rather than an artful selfie. We need to see how she explains ideas that lead children to a scientific mind.
Now you are considering her behavior in a video targeted towards parents and children to be inappropriate based on your highly inappropriate sexualization of normal behavior. The video aims to be fun, visual, and cutesy, not a come on for dudes.
Hah, yes. Honestly, if that woman's behavior is "sexual and flirtatious" then my son's kindergarten teacher is hitting on him (she puts on the same act around her students).
Yes, the video was as much about selling Liukas as a character and internet-celebrity as it was about selling her book. That's how marketing works. But anybody who sees it as "sexual" watches too much of the wrong kind of anime.
If I bounce my friend's daughter on my knee and chat to her it's fine - if I bounce my (married) friend on my knee then it would be considered highly inappropriate in the same circumstance and an affront to my partner and hers. Same behaviour, the first is innocent; the second might be but would be assumed to be sexual or appear pseudo-sexual and so [in my country and circumstance] be considered wrong.
[I've not watched the video yet but am addressing the general case.]
The kickstarter video is not directed towards men specifically. A lot of posters seem to see it that the default audience is men and therefore her behavior is somehow flirting. Of course, the audience for kickstarter includes all type of people, including younger children.
Thank you for this very constructive dialogue, I have developed so much insight in this exchange. You've clearly gone to great lengths to communicate thoughtfully and understand the true matter in this situation. Thank you.