Front-page news in Keski-Häme newspaper

The New Year has started well for Dragons Out books. The book donation of 30 books to Tuulos Elementary School made front-page news in Keski-Häme newspaper. I drove to the school personally to hand out the books and discuss the book and learning software testing with Principal Antti Lamminpää of the School. I was pleasantly surprised to find the Keski-Häme journalist present to interview both of us. It would have been nice to see how kids react in getting the books, which was what I and the Principal planned originally, but the increase in Covid-19 cases spoiled that plan. Well, this was nice, too! Well done Mikko Kaloinen Foundation, who donated these books to Tuulos school! My humble thanks.

You can read the scan of the article at the end of this blog post, in Finnish. Link to Keski-Häme article is here.

Other news - my preorder stock of Finnish Dragons Out books is almost sold out. There are some copies left, and if you (or your company) buy them from me, you still get to participate in the school donation campaign https://www.dragonsout.com/p/preorder-dragons-out-book.html. I'll keep donating one book per three sold books. I'm also getting more book donation requests from schools, so it will be new schools that get the new donations. I'm in discussion with the Ministry of Education to hand a Diploma of Book Donations to the Minister, and the list of donating companies will be part of that Diploma. Looking forward to it.

Now I'm changing my sights to the English edition of the Dragons Out book. Proofreading done in December, next I look forward to hearing from my publisher Austin Macauley about the design phase of the book. It shouldn't be long!

Here's the scan of the Keski-Häme article.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Amazing feedback and school visits

Image
 I recently got some  amazing feedback  from a 9-year-old reader through his dad. The Dragons Out book was an exciting Christmas present that the boy started reading on his own. He did the exercises at the end of the chapters and was really thrilled about them ("I did all of those great exercises!"). Upon asking why the book was so thrilling, he answered, "It was a great book because it had true things and fantasy side by side, and the exercises were fun!". It feels so good to hear such feedback - keep it coming! The unique approach of fantasy coupled with testing works. Remember my school visits, earlier? It is  again time to have school visits in Finland , too. It is especially nice now that face-to-face meetings are possible, and I don't need to access the school class virtually over a Teams meeting. That works too, yes, with a teacher facilitating in the class, but it is so much nicer and more concrete to meet and teach children face-to-face. I asked for som...
Read more

Article in Dimensio-magazine

I recently had a chance to write in the magazine of math teachers. Mathematics is one of the natural stepping stones towards software development and software testing. The association of math teachers (MAOL) has been interested in cooperation with me. They considered software testing to be an interesting angle for anyone interested in mathematics. I wrote about my book writing project and how software testing can be taught to children via a fantasy book. The article is in Finnish here: https://www.dimensiolehti.fi/opetetaan-lapsille-ohjelmistotestausta-fantasiakirjan-avulla/
Read more

AI creating Dragons and testing stories

Image
In recent times, it seems like the whole world has gone crazy trying to use Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence). These LLMs (large language models) can create content based on user prompts.  Now I tried the LLM Brave Leo (Mixtral) to create a Dragons Out -like story for me. Although it was just experimental, the results are quite impressive. I used just three prompts. Finally, I tried to get a picture of all this - a fourth prompt. It didn't work, but I got a description, which I used in a prompt of a picture generation AI, Deep AI.  Did you learn something from the below? I think an LLM can help with quality like this. But the picture was quite disappointing to me. Anyway, I think I'll write my own stuff also in the future and ask Adri for more fantastic illustrations. Me: What is RPG? Brave Leo: RPG stands for "Role-Playing Game." It is a type of game where players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting and engage in activities to develop their ch...
Read more