ALL YOU NEED IS - When coding really becomes child’s play.

We live in the digital world, so how come employers of the 21st century are struggling more than ever to find the digital skills required to run a successful business?
Digital skills are not always taught in high schools and the technicality of computer science degrees scare away more creative teenagers, leaving the huge demand for e-skills unsatisfied.
This week all you need is… shows you the avant-garde approaches to teach teens to code with fun, the latest Google’s Movies app and much much more.
According to the president of the European commission Manuel Barroso, coding and the understanding of programming languages is quickly climbing the ladder of the most requested skills by employers.
This is what the creators of Hakitzu: Code of the Warrior must have had in mind when they developed a strategy game that prompts players to type basic JavaScript to control characters.
The free iPad app pits two robots against each other in a battle arena, where each user takes turns coding increasingly complex instructions to move and use weapons.
Hakitzu takes an immersive gamification approach to stimulate players’ interest in coding and allow them to learn variables, functions, core construction of code, and syntax for JavaScript, without having to attend an expensive, and rather dull, programming course.
This is very much inline with what FreeFormers, one of our clients, is doing.
They are a social enterprise, driven by a one-for-one business model, which, as the name says, teaches teenagers how to code for free every time a business signs up for one of their trainings.
What’s your idea about coding games and training for teens? Is this the future of education?
Leave a comment below and let us know your thoughts.
- Google Play’s Movies and TV App Gets a Pop Up Video Feel - MarketingPilgrim
Have you ever found yourself pondering over the name of an actor or song while watching a film?
Those days will soon be over, as Google’s Movies and TV app will include a new feature known as “info cards”, which relies on Google’s Knowledge Graph to give greater insight into your favourite actors, films and shows.
By tapping on an actor’s face you’ll be able to learn more about him, his age, place of birth, his character in the movie, and his recent work, or scroll through the info cards to learn more about the movie or soundtrack.

However, at least for now, not everyone will benefit form the new Google app, as the “info cards” will work only on movies watched on an Android tablet.
If your planning to buy a tablet, would “info cards” influence you purchase?
Let us know what you think about it, regardless of whether you’re an iOS or an Android fan.
The Internet is currently suffering under the largest cyber-attack ever, which seems to have slowed down the traffic and sites across the World Wide Web.
The attack follows a conflict between Spamhaus and Cyberbunker, a Dutch hosting company.
Spamhaus maintains lists of servers that are known to be used for illicit or malicious uses. These lists are then used by ISPs around the world in order to block access from those places to the wider net.
On the other hand, Cyberbunker is willing to host on its servers pretty much anything but child porn and terrorism related stuff, which has gain the company the reputation of spam’s heaven.
Spamhaus has added those servers to its block listings and this seems to have annoyed some people who are now conducting denial of service attacks against it.
But there’s a bright side to this huge cyber attack. Despite it causing great disruptions, it’s likely it’ll motivate the security industry to take more serious action on the open DNS issue.
What’s your take on this? Do you think Cyberbunker I s responsible for the attack? Or do you believe Spamhaus doesn’t have the right to tell what’s acceptable and what’s not on the Internet?
- Twitter Shuts Down Tweetdeck For Android, Iphone And AIR, Discontinues Tweetdeck’s Facebook Integration. - TechCrunch
Just when we were starting to recover from the recent ‘loss’ of Google Reader, Twitter announces it’ll discontinue another of our favorite tech services: TweetDeck for mobile. Twitter will remove its older TweetDeck apps from their respective app stores in May but it hasn’t yet said whether it’ll replace it with a new app.
Furthermore, the web-based service version of the app will loose its Facebook integration, but Twitter hasn’t provided any details on why and when this will happen.
If, so far, you had eyes only for TweetDeck, do not panic. There are many worthy alternatives that will allow you to keep track of your tweets and, perhaps, even mend your broken social heart.
Here’s a snapshot.

- 10 Technologies You Don’t Need to Upgrade – Angela Liao
If you too work in digital, you’re probably familiar with that feeling of wanting to stay up to date with the latest technologies and constantly trying to figure out what the next big thing will be.
But not everyone thinks like us, and we like that.
For the less tech savvy people out there, and for the many of us who are a bit too obsessed with technology, here is an infographic that may help to put things into context…

Whether you’re at school or in full-time employment, it’s never too late to learn how to code. And why shouldn’t you when it can be just as much fun as playing a videogame?
If you agree, or disagree, leave a comment below and join the conversation. Till next week… Gabs (@gabrielegenola)
Tags: all you need is, coding, digital world, FreeFormers, Google
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