Today in school a student told me about a teen-age neighbor who shared with him a hacking video game site. Although the student seemed impressed with his neighbor’s knowledge and abilities, he didn’t seem to think that “hacking” anything was a very good idea. After school I was going through my RSS Feeds and saw a post entitled “License to Hack: Kids are getting into hacking in a whole new way. And that’s a good thing“. It seems that the term “hacking” which many of us consider as illegal and dangerous behavior, is now something educators may actually encourage??

So what exactly is hacking? According to software advocate Eric S. Raymond—it’s “the practice of modifying the features of a system in order to accomplish a goal outside of the creator’s original purpose.” Because those goals have stereotypically been malicious in intend, Hacking has received a bad rap.

Currently, our curriculum at Lounsberry includes using tech tools and web based platforms for learning. However, we are not learning,  even the basics about building and/or updating these tools ourselves. What do you think? Should we be using tools such as Scratch, which teach the basics of computer programming and design? Should we encourage hacking at Lounsberry?