Group items tagged

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This book will familiarize you with the Scratch visual programming environment, focusing on using Scratch to learn computer science. The book is structured as a collection of tasks. Each chapter teaches a new concept, but the concept is introduced in order to solve a specific task such as animating dancing images or building a game. Each chapter starts with a simple task, but as soon as we solve one task, we add additional tasks to extend the existing task. The sequence of tasks will require a new construct of Scratch or the use of constructs you know in new ways.

Scratch is an object-oriented programming language from the MIT Media Lab. It is now much easier to get started in Scratch thanks to a new release of the platform that "lives entirely in the browser".

50 minute presentation on use of Scratch to teach some maths concepts 10-year-old and 16-year-old kids. Interestingly even the 16-year-olds thought the cat made it look like "kids stuff". There's a recording of the full presentation at https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/recording/playback/link/table/dropin?sid=2008350&suid=D.9FA226957D30A14AB25F33DEBBF5D3 (note worth using the Blackboard recording rather than the video, even though it's more of a faff, as the former includes a shot of the speaker where he demonstrates things physically, whereas the latter just shows the presentation)

Runs on Adobe AIR on Mac and Windows (not Linux yet)

Here is a recently published table of courses (some Google's, most from others) using Google Course Builder. Includes the previously reported Scratch-based "Creative Computing".

I have been in touch with this writer before (he sent me a review copy of an earlier book and I blogged about it) on the off chance this might be any help

This caught my eye. I think it is probably run in Google CourseBuilder.

Suggestion that social networks could be instrumental in helping MOOCs extend reach beyond those who are already enfranchised and educated. Potentially relevant to Citizens' Maths?

My gut feeling is that social networking could well be really important to us. In the Scratch context, I feel the Scratch community is potentially useful.