October was once Computer Learning Month, supported by the Computer Learning Foundation between 2000 and 2002. Apparently it’s now defunct, but I’m upset that I missed out on the fun, and, if you haven’t figured this out by now, I’m a sucker for modern-era holidays that serve as a celebration of scientific thought and Enlightenment Era ideals.

Plus, through the wonders of Googletubing and Webernetting, I was able to find all these cool educational materials for teaching kids about computers, posted in honor of this event, still archived online!

For instance, Crayola posted some cool coloring pages with all sorts of nifty fun facts. Did you know that we call programming errors “computer bugs” because in the early days of computing, real live bugs would get into the computer and short out the wiring! Actually, I think some of the old-timey programmers where I work told me about this, but I just rolled my eyes at them (“There goes gramps babbling about the ‘good old days.’ Probably forgot to take his anti-dementia pills again.”).

Apple has a great front page to a portal with teaser-descriptions of all sorts of great articles about how you can use computers to train teachers, let kids express themselves with digital video, promote scientific literacy, and a myriad of other ways computers can enhance education. Unfortunately, the teaser descriptions are all you get at this portal, because all the links are now dead. So Apple computers can go $%&# themselves for not paying the few pennies it would have cost them to keep what was probably at most 100kb of data available online. Jerks.

Anyways! On to happier items. Christopher Farms Elementary School, in Virginia Beach, has a super-dupper list of links to all sorts of jolly old interwebslinging sites with fun and games. I especially liked the It’s Raining Letter! typing game, it’s the bee’s knees! Not all of the links still work, but some of them do, which makes Christopher Farms Elementary School a whole lot cooler than those frakwits at Apple. Jerks.

The Home School Learning Network, for xenophobic parents who fear the possibility of their children developing social skills, has a list of online activities and information for parents and children to improve their sheltering skills. Because we all know, despite the Interweb’s vast seas of information, it is a “network,” which means it can be just as dangerous as going outside! Stay away from the evils of the Hello Kitty chatroom children! Stay far far away!

I did find a link to a memo stating Virginia Governor Gilmore issued a Certificate of Recognition for Computer/Technology Learning Month in Virginia. So technically I think Virginians are supposed to still be observing it, but then again, this was Gilmore, and he signed a lot of things he had no understanding of.

Anyways. There you have it, October is still Computer Learning Month as far as this blog is concerned, and I plan on using it as an excuse to post some of my experiences working in programming and also as an excuse to really, honestly for-real-this-time learn the Rules of Database Normalization (PDF) well enough to explain them here so that non-computer literate folks can understand them. There is a high probability you will never hear mention of this again.