| Tag Archives: programming

Scratch … and …Others!

by Clarence Fisher

I’ve been interested in Scratch for a while now.

An interesting, fun (and free) piece of software, it’s a good place to start if you want the students in your class to learn to do some basic animation and programming.

Scratch is in the beginning stages of a renaissance in my classroom as my kids have discovered it on our new laptops. At this point kids are just playing with it, trading around some information and spending some time with it. A budding Scratch club is building.

As I have the world’s most organized educational assistant working in my classroom, I had her make a set of these Scratch cards and print off one of the manuals (pdf) so we’d have it in the classroom. I’ve also put the manuals on our tablets so that kids can have access to it in a few different ways.

But over the last few days I’ve learned that there are at least two spin off projects from Scratch for people who want to work in different ways on projects that are more advanced.

BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks) comes out of Berkley and adds more functionality to the programming blocks that Scratch has available.

There is also Panther, another project that adds additional ideas to what is possible from using the original piece of software.

I’m not sure if there are others out there that are variants of Scratch itself. I couldn’t find any others on a quick look around. There are a wealth of other resources available in this genre (like Stencyl… I love Stencyl) that allow kids to be creative and learn some programming as well. Most of these programs are free, and there are a lot of resources online to use. They simply need some time to explore.

School of Webcraft

by Clarence Fisher 1 Comment

Mozilla is soon opening up another session at the School of Webcraft.

If you’re not familiar with this, the idea is simple: free, open source, creative commons licensed, online courses in web technologies.

Previously, Mozilla has offered courses in such things as Drupal, HTML5, Python and design among others. This concept revolves around non-proprietary applications. This is why courses in HTML are good, while those in Flash (for example) aren’t.

If you run your own site or have to do any programming (even occasionally like many of us do) these courses look like they would be great. They would also be awesome to pass along to kids in your building that might appreciate them.

Free is good.

And We’re Using Worksheets….?

by Clarence Fisher 2 Comments

This morning my ten year old son brought me an ad from a magazine that he gets for a new Lego video game called Lego Universe . Getting ahead of the game he told me that this looked interesting and that he might be interested in it for Christmas. (good strategy!)

My kids (and I of course) have played the Lego Star Wars and Harry Potter games and had a lot of fun with them. So, doing what any geeky parent would, I headed online and found reviews, a fairly extensive Wikipedia entry and a trailer on Youtube.

I then ran into this video, an overview of the game made by some of the people involved in its building and design. They showed some of the standard footage of the game showing off cool stuff. Then, from about the 2:30 mark, they blew me away.

Watch:

So let’s get this straight. In this game, I do the standard quest and battle kind of stuff, collecting blocks and pieces along the way. Then, I take those pieces back to the space that I get as a game subscriber and I can build whatever I want. The video shows houses of all sorts being built, from forts to castles, to high tech homes. As a game subscriber I get access to every single type of Lego piece that there is. A sandbox for creativity.

But the part that really blew me away was the programming piece. On my property I can also build whatever I want: vehicles, creatures, inventions of all types and then I can program them, using an interface that looks on the video like a cross between Lego Mindstorms, Phun, and Scratch. I can add behaviours and make my creations responsive to their environment. I can make games and spaces that other people can play in. I can share these creations and games with the other players in this universe.

Creativity. Programming. Global collaboration. For 10 year olds.

And what’s going on in our classrooms?

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts: