Think of all the times you’ve been on the Internet and all of the different Web pages you’ve seen. Each of those pages had to be created and designed by someone (like Ada or Tycho!). To create a Web page from scratch, you need to learn a little bit of coding. Common website-coding languages have names like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These are the coding languages that Ada would be learning to help build Nina’s website, Nina Nina Land. Ada would use these languages to tell the website what it should look like: what font it should use, how big the words should be, and what colors should show up on the screen. Because Nina is asking Ada to build a very interactive Web page, Ada will probably have to learn a little bit of other languages, like Ruby on Rails, Python, or PHP. Different computer languages are designed to do different things. Of course, Nina wants her website to be as unique and amazing as she is. So you can imagine how challenging (and maybe frustrating) it would be for Ada to need to learn so many new programming languages to build it for her! Are you interested in coding? If you’re just starting out, playing with MIT’s Scratch is a good start. You can find that at scratch.mit.edu.
Elevators have a very long history. In fact, very basic elevators were used as early as 336 B.C. in ancient Rome! Modern elevators that were designed with safety brakes came along much later, in the 1850s. Once elevators were safe, it completely changed the way buildings in big cities were designed. Why? Well, before elevators, you wouldn’t want to make a building very tall, because people would have to climb too many steps to get to their apartments or offices. With elevators, engineers and architects could make buildings taller and taller! The elevator that is in Mr. Peebles’s apartment is a special type of old elevator that uses pulleys and gears to allow the person riding inside to make the elevator go up and down. There aren’t many of these left around, but you can find videos of hand-powered elevators in action on YouTube!
A handcycle is like a bicycle, but it has three wheels instead of two, and you power the bike with your hands instead of your feet. There are many different types of handcycles, but in Tycho’s case, his had two wheels in the back and one wheel in the front. Because these bikes can be powered with your hands, handcycles can be ridden by people who are paralyzed from the waist down. In fact, handcycling is one of the newest competitions at the Paralympic Games. Some handcycles, like the one that Tycho and Mr. Peebles built, are designed to go off-road and tackle tough, mountainous terrain!
Remember when Ada couldn’t figure out how to code a specific feature that Nina wanted, and Tycho said he would check the coding forums for help? This was a clever idea, because programmers are great at helping each other, and oftentimes you can simply reuse someone else’s work to solve your own problem. In other fields this might be considered cheating, but it’s so common in programming, there are websites that exist for the purpose of sharing codes people have written. A good example is the code sharing website GitHub, where programmers post the code they’ve written and encourage others to use it. You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel!
If you’re a programmer with a question, like Ada and Tycho, there are other helpful websites you can go to where you can look for answers. Websites like Stack Overflow and Reddit have a community of programmers who are constantly asking and answering questions about every programming language imaginable. Have you run into a problem you can’t figure out? These websites may already have the answer you need!
When you build your own website, you can use Web analytics to learn a bit about the people who are visiting your site. I made my own website called TheSpaceGal.com, and I like to use Web analytics to track how many people visit my website each week. You can see how many people come to your website and what they are clicking on. On my website, most people click on the About page! Ada, Nina, and Tycho used the Web analytics on Nina’s website to find the IP addresses of the people visiting her site. Then they used those IP addresses to figure out where those visitors were coming from. Thank goodness Ada and Tycho knew a thing or two about Web analytics, or they may have never had the proof they needed to bust Mr. Miroir!