Bits and Bytes

Archive for February, 2009

This simple video shows how easy it is to copy scripts from one sprite to another in Scratch.

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Note: The videos were created without extra lighting, only ambient fluorescent lighting was available. The camera used was a Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS. The green screen and arm sleeve were created with green felt, and a hot glue gun to close the seam on the sleeve – total cost (without puppet) about $25.00.  The next step will be to create a portable stand from PVC piping, the cost should be about $40.00 (pictures to come).

Example 1 – Scene shot with actor and green screen. The shadows below the beaver puppet in the video are a result of poor lighting. The beaver apologizes for the bad acting, he blames the director! The beaver was appalled with his appearing to dive into solid ground.

http://blogs.wsd1.org/etr/files/greenscreen.flv

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Example 2 – Scene shot with actor in front of the green screen, no green screen filter (Transition in Movie Maker) has been applied.

http://blogs.wsd1.org/etr/files/greenscreen-no-chromakey.flv

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Example 3 – Scene shot with no background, but the chroma key/green screen filter (Transition in Movie Maker) applied. All we see is the beaver’s acting badly, or as the beaver likes to say, “suffering from bad direction”.

http://blogs.wsd1.org/etr/files/greenscreen-nobackground.flv

In June 1992, Patrick Logan and Brian Metcalfe were fortunate to attend a workshop that Brenda Longclaws, Aboriginal Education Consultant, organized for all coordinators and consultants in our Division. Brenda arranged for Rosemary Ackley-Christensen, Director of the Indian Education Department of the Minneapolis Public Schools, to speak to us about aboriginal education and meeting the needs of all our children in our classes.

Rosemary provided a very enlightened workshop which gave us a better understanding of the aboriginal culture and how we might better support educators working with aboriginal children. Brian particularly remembers one story that Rosemary related. She asked us how we as educators would traditionally reward younger children who had completed assignments or who did well on various tests. We generally agreed, of course, that all younger children love to get “stickers” on their papers as feedback for a job well done. Rosemary went on to explain that aboriginal children did not view the “happy face” in the same way that other children might.

Rosemary spent a great deal of time with aboriginal children determining what types of “stickers” might provide them with the “warm fuzzies” that are so important to young children. When Rosemary was told that “my grandma’s smiling face makes me feel good” or that “I feel safe in my grandpa’s arms”, by young children, she started to make up stickers with pictures of elders to which the younger aboriginal child could better relate. With so much of the learning of an aboriginal child dependent on the visual as opposed to the auditory process, Rosemary began collecting and designing clip art which she could introduce into classrooms.

Patrick Logan asked if Rosemary would be willing to share a copy of her clip art masters with him. She graciously agreed and Patrick spent a great deal of time scanning in these images and converting them to .jpg format.  A good deal of the graphics include the faces of children, with images ranging from blossoms, leaves, pine trees, feathers, eagles, rabbits, and other animals.

Originally written by: Brian Metcalfe, 1992

Photoscape is a very powerful, relatively easy to use application which offers many interesting options. It’s a combination photo editor, collage creator, image splitter, the list goes on, and on…  The interface can be a little daunting (features, features, features), but once you get use to it I doubt you’ll want to give it up, it’s absolutely phenomenal – and it’s FREE (no nag screens, no placed advertisements)!

Key Features

• Viewer: View your folders photos, slide show
• Editor: resizing, brightness and color adjustment, white balance, back light correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode, adding text, drawing pictures, cropping, filters, red eye removal, blooming
• Batch editor: Batch editing multiple photos
• Page: Make one photo by merging multiple photos at the page frame
• Combine: Make one photo by attaching multiple photos vertically or horizontally
• Animated GIF: Make one animation photo with multiple photos
• Print: Print portrait shot, carte de visite, passport photo
• Splitter: Divide a photo into multiple parts
• Screen Capture: Capture your screen shot and save it
• Color Picker: Zoom in screen on images, search and pick the color
• Rename: Change photo file names in batch mode
• Raw Converter: Convert RAW to JPG

Download (from WSD) – New version 3.3

Alice Links:

• Main Site – www.alice.org
  • About Alice
• Download Alice Version 2.2 with Alice textbook worlds- from WSD
  • Windows with Learning to Program (185MB)
  • Mac with Learning to Program (162MB)

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice’s interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

Alice Demonstration

http://blogs.wsd1.org/etr/files/alicedemonstrationvideo.flv

Storytelling Alice Links:

• Main Site – http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/
  • Research on Stoytelling Alice
• Download Storytelling Alice – from WSD
  • Download StorytellingAlice.zip (122 MB)
  • Storytelling Alice Guide

In contrast to the large number of people who use computers and computer programs in their daily lives, relatively few learn to create their own computer programs. Storytelling Alice is a programming environment designed to motivate a broad spectrum of middle school students (particularly girls) to learn to program computers through creating short 3D animated movies.

To enable and encourage users to create animated stories, Storytelling Alice includes:

1. High-level animations that enable users to program social interactions between characters.
2. A story-based tutorial that introduces users to programming through building a story.
3. A gallery of 3D characters and scenery with custom animations designed to spark story ideas.

Storytelling Alice provides a motivating context in which to learn programming. A study comparing middle school girls’ experiences with learning to program in Storytelling Alice and in a version of Alice without storytelling features (Generic Alice) showed that:

• Users of Storytelling Alice spent 42% more time programming than users of Generic Alice.
• Users of Storytelling Alice were more than three times as likely to sneak extra time to work on their programs as users of Generic Alice (51% of Storytelling Alice users vs. 16% of Generic Alice users snuck extra time to program).
• Despite the focus on making programming more fun, users of Storytelling Alice were just as successful at learning basic programming concepts as users of Generic Alice.

I’ve posted a series of images to show how I was able to repair a Lego NXT Brick that had the LCD fail (Note: It still played the familiar startup tune, but the LCD was not displaying properly – at all). Please remember that doing this will absolutely void any warranty on the NXT Brick.

I know that others have used different ways of re-soldering the surface mounted capacitors, all I had was a magnifying glass, Weller soldering iron, and a steady hand.

I would suggest this is a last chance repair!

Magic Words – A Creative Software Toy

Magic Words is a new type of creative software for children. With this program children can:

• Create interactive animated worlds
• Create their own friendly non-violent computer games
• Explore the meaning of words as part of learning how to read

Links:

• ComiKit – Creative Construction Kit – Site
• Download

Below is a list of links to various resources for mathematics:

• WSD – IWB Blog
• Google Custom Search – Mathematics
• Elementary SMART Lessons (Wichita Public Schools)
  
• Math Workbook (unsure of the author)
• Illuminations
• Math Tools Browse (Drexel)
• Jim Cornish – Math Resources
• Longwood Central School District
• Kindergarten Math
• Base 10 Blocks

Money Matters Canadian Money Game by Keith Strachan

• Download Money Matters