ownedthx

I'd love to help mentor/coach folks trying to learn programming, and would like to do it over Slack (or something close to it).

I'm thinking for others like me would find this to be an extremely convenient way to volunteer. I could set aside an hour, or more, while sitting in front of my computer.

Ideally there is already a 'vetted' slack channel where people who needed the help were in need of help ... but not abusing it. I'm thinking of a Slack channel for a non-profit, coding bootcamp. Just to be clear; I'm not looking at making the bootcamp or something like it. I'm looking to just offer my services to the students in a way that works out with my schedule too; it would let me give more time.

Anyone seen something like this already that they could recommend?

Say I wanted to know if I could find data on the number of public servants a particular city employs, and data on the sort of jobs these employees have, and any other related data?

I don't know the 1st step to take in terms of finding this data.

Any suggestions?

I help with a hour long 'computer lab' for my child's kindergarten class, and the teacher asked if I had any ideas for the last 3 classes of the year.

A big plus in usability is if the website reads to the student (with a contextual ? sign or something like that). This is critical for most of the kids based on their reading level.

Being a programmer, I would love to let them build (and publish!) a website, but I have not found a website builder that would be simple enough for a child. But that's just one idea.

Educational games are OK too.

Over a year ago, we released JamKazam (https://www.jamkazam.com). At the time, our focus was solely on getting the audio as low-delay as possible, to enable musicians to play across the internet, in real-time. Lag has to be not noticeable, or at least tolerable, for this to work. There is lots of skepticism, because I think people intuitively know that every combination of network connection/audio gear won't be fast enough, so we have to do our best to set that expectation while still encouraging people to try it out... because for many, it does work. On the other hand, some people don't care about the latency; they will play across oceans where latency must be horrible, but they still get something out of it.

Anyway, users have been asking for video since we launched the site, and yesterday we finally got it out the door. We've made every effort to do what we can to ensure that audio receives priority over video.

We've also tried to address some problem areas; it's hard to have a 'multi-player only' website when you are trying to get it off the ground. Also, the free-formed nature of a open 'jam session' is really daunting for most musicians. So we added multi-track covers of popular songs so that if you want to play with a band for a particular song by yourself, or want to play a song with someone else across the internet, you can do that. By the way, some of these covers are really dead on, like this Pearl Jam one (you can listen to previews of the tracks as well as the full mix): https://www.jamkazam.com/landing/jamtracks/pearl-jam-even-flow

Any questions or comments are welcome.