Almost there!

Seventeenth update

Put your party hats on - this 16 month ride is almost at its’ finish. I’ve lined up everything with Feiwel & Friends for fall, I have some exact dates for you and it’s time for a summer update.

What you’ll get and when:

Hello Ruby: Adventures in Coding and workbook. The final page count is 112 pages and I’m super pleased with the end result. These start shipping a little before official publishing date October 6th.
eBook in mobi, ePub and PDF. (And no one else is getting the PDF version!). This will be shipped to you in the beginning of September, a month before official publishing date.
As a thank you for the long wait, a very special Kickstarter only backer booklet with 24 pages of exclusive exercises, stickers and computing crafts. This will ship together with the book in early October and as a PDF.

Shipping information

I’ll send a reminder two weeks before closing the address changes, but now is a good time to check that those addresses you submitted are still ok. You can do this by following instructions here.

If you’ve changed countries in the last year, please let me know and I’ll make extra arrangements. The book deliveries will be done by an external company, but I’ll start sending the posters and other special pledge categories in August.

I couldn’t be more proud of the product Hello Ruby turned into. Thanks for your patience - the book will be worth the wait, I promise!

What’s next?

Hello Ruby also has confirmed publishers in Finland, Sweden, Japan, Korea, Australia and Netherlands and many new ones in the works. It’s going to be an exciting fall with many new announcements coming up.

I also did a short piece for Telegraph and spoke about lessons learned from Hello Ruby atRedDotRubyConf.

My spring schedule included also working on the web community side of Hello Ruby, in preparation for the official launch in fall. As I’ve mentioned before, I see Hello Ruby as something way more than only a book - as a living, breathing community of kids sharing their creations and being gently guided to the world of technology.

This has meant learning a lot about early childhood development (I’ve gotten to know Dewey, Vygotsky and Montessori well during the last months!) and lots of hands-on experimentation.

One exercise I’ve loved doing with kids is where I give them a sticker with an on/off button and ask them to imagine any object in the room being a computer. The technologies kids imagine and describe are pretty amazing and help them see the world in a different way.

Another set of exercises we’ve been working on is a party kit to organise coding birthdays. This will be released later in the fall, but I wanted to show you some behind the scenes pictures from prototyping day. (You can sneak a peak also of the rest of the team, through the first Hello Ruby Fellowship organised this spring)

The remote control exercise allowed kids to learn about the computing concepts of events (if I do this, then that happens) through wiggling, jumping and dancing. The kids also got to design their own buttons and learned how small and exact commands need to broken down into. One of the most heart warming stories I heard came from a little girl who coded her own button to make mom happy. After consideration, they came to the conclusion that it should be broken further down into smiling to mom, cleaning up, saying thank you.

The tattoos were a huge hit and everyone had fun. I look forward to seeing these parties in the wild come fall!

I’ve also slowly started work on the mobile app with prototyping some ideas on paper. I’ll share more once we’re ready for testing, but it’s been an interesting challenge for me to rethink what the experience of learning about the computational thinking concepts should look like on screen. So far my list of design requirements looks like this:

Not only tapping, encourage exploration.
Small, simple experiences that connect concepts to real life.
Be multiplayer.
Always keep a sprinkle of silliness.

Oh, and there’s also a logo for digital products:

I also have so many thoughts about the humbling and unique experience of taking a raw idea into a ready product through Kickstarter, but I think I’ll need to wait until you have the book in your hands. A huge thank you for all the support during the last 16 months!

Hugs,

Linda