The Problem: Create a basic 1970s style Pong game for one player using the Processing programming language. The paddle will be on the right and the ball will bounce off of the three other sides. If the ball passes the paddle while the ball is traveling to the right, game play ends. The paddle will [...]
Over at his blog, Mark Guzdial has raised questions about the ability of (a) curricula and (b) instruction to be value-/culture-neutral. I wonder whether it isn’t more important that they be manifest and manifold in education. In other words, we need value transparency, to express the values and cultural biases in our designs clearly and [...]
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
March 24th is Ada Lovelace Day, a commemoration of the contributions of women in science and technology in honor of it’s namesake. Ada Lovelace (nay Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace) was the daughter of Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke, born in 1815. She was a contemporary of Charles Babbage, who is generally [...]
Alfred Thompson questioned on his blog today whether the customary first programming exercise, Hello World, should be replaced with something that’s more flexible and calls on students to engage in a short, non-trivial first act as a programmer. I admit, I’ve used Hello World myself with students, but usually not as a first activity. Instead, [...]
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Imagine for a moment that you were going to teach writing in standard English in the same way we tend to teach computer programming. Alright… Let’s learn to write. Before you can write, you need to know about the fundamentals of the language we’re going to use. A language is a collection of words and [...]
Eric Freudenthal of the iMPaCT: a Media-Propelled introduction to Computational Thinking project spoke at SIGCSE 2010 about how to engage students who are math phobic with computation and, thereby, with math. Using Python and computation about dynamic systems, students work to understand how code == math == concepts. One issue raised was how ethical it [...]