programming

Adobe flash game-maker

admin — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 15:57:17 +0000

'Sploder' looks promising - has game creators for different types of games : http://www.sploder.com/free-game-creator.php

Scratch with Friends

admin — Mon, 16 May 2011 20:52:48 +0000

My 6 year old came up with this one: invite your friends to each add a character to a game, and see what happens.

Scratch UnLesson 1

admin — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 07:50:21 +0000

Summary:

Scratch from MIT is a great way to introduce kids to programming. Kids from 5 to 15 will enjoy creating their own animations and games, with engaging characters and a way to record their own voices or sound effects. It teaches real object oriented programming, but with a drag and drop interface that makes getting started and making changes easy and intuitive.

For the first experience with scratch, I would say rather than start with a formal lesson plan, to just encourage your child to explore and try different things. It would help if the parent or teacher spends an hour or two ahead of time to learn the interface.

Once the child has had a chance to play around and make things happen on the screen, then it is a good time to step back and ask, 'what would you like this program to do?' while encouraging the child to keep her goals fairly simple and doable.

Some simple initial goals to choose from:

Scratch that game-maker itch

admin — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 08:45:36 +0000

Scratch from MIT : http://scratch.mit.edu is a graphical interface for creating logical object-oriented programs, quickly and easily. I read a review of it in MAKE Magazine some months ago and finally tried it out. Looks extremely promising, and its easy to put together a simple intelligent animation in minutes. (well, a bit more for reading the instructions - but after I read them it didn't take long)

Teach Kids Programming with Javascript: Lesson 0 - Getting Started

admin — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 10:15:34 +0000

Summary:

Just copy and paste this code, and you'll have kids editing programs within a half-hour. All you need is any web browser and any text editor, like Notepad.

The first thing new programmers need to learn, is the Write-Save-Open ; Edit-Save-Reload sequence. Here's how it goes. First open up Notepad, or TextEdit, or any plain old text editor. Copy and paste the following into the editor:

<html> <head> <script>

function popup() {

alert("Hello out there!");
}

</script>
</head>
<body>
<button onclick="popup()">
</body>
</html>

Down to Grade/Age:

2nd Grade

Up thru Grade/Age:

Adult

Game programming with Javascript?

admin — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 10:02:38 +0000

I like to start off teaching Javascript, because everyone with a computer has all the tools you need: a browser and a text editor. Its pretty easy to have kids change the screen color, make pop-ups appear, take user input and munge it around. But kids want to program games, so I'm considering Flash. In the meantime, here is a full-fledged Javascript game we may try to edit.

http://code.google.com/p/js-blaster/

This is a blog post rather than a lesson plan, as we haven't tried it out yet!

How Many Questions?

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 07:11:20 +0000

Summary:

This variation on Twenty Questions teaches kids a bit of information theory and lets them take a different approach to powers of 2.

First, the kids should be familiar with the regular game of Twenty Questions.

Then, ask as an open-ended question: "Suppose instead of the whole world. you were only allowed to think of certain objects. How many questions would it take to find the right one? What if the questions had to have only yes/no answers?"

Down to Grade/Age:

Kindergarten

Up thru Grade/Age:

High School