Bits and Bytes

Posts Tagged ‘pr-3.3’

International Futures (IFs) is a large-scale, long-term, integrated global modeling system. It represents demographic, economic, energy, agricultural, socio-political, and environmental subsystems for 183 countries interacting in the global system. The central purpose of IFs is to facilitate exploration of global futures through alternative scenarios. The model is integrated with a large database containing values for its many foundational data series since 1960. Through this web site IFs is freely available to users both on-line and in downloadable form.

http://www.ifs.du.edu/

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.

Scratch is a programming language from MIT’s Media Lab that makes it easy for students to develop programs.

Scratch is not so much a procedural language as a drag and drop environment for creating interactive animations, annotated stories, slideshows, prototypes and games. It’s designed to be as simple to use as possible, so students as young as 7 can create their own animations.

The design philosophy behind Scratch was “don’t design something for kids that you don’t also find engaging and interesting,”

To create programs in Scratch, one simply adds “sprites” onto a work area and then attaches actions to each sprite to make them move, change color, bounce off other objects, and make sounds.

Scratch is available for Mac OS X and Windows, and can be downloaded for free at scratch.mit.edu.

Why use Scratch?

• LwICT Continuum
• Bloom’s Revised Digital Taxonomy
• Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age
• New Pathways into Robotics: Strategies for Broadening Participation
• Scratch and 21st Century Learning Skills
• Edutainment, No Thanks…

Download Scratch from WSD

• Download Scratch 1.4 – Windows Installer (from the WSD)
• Download Scratch 1.4 – Macintosh Installer (from the WSD)
• Scratch Learning Cards – (from MIT site)

Award Winning High School Course

• http://www.funlearning.de/
  • PDF of the above site (English)
• Research Paper – Three Drivers for Creativity…

Documentation, Tutorials Learning Resources for Scratch 1.4:

• PicoBoard – Real world sensors for Scratch projects
• Programming Concepts – for Scratch 1.4
• Reference Guide – for Scratch 1.4
• Scratch Site at MIT – An on-line collection of Scratch applications
  (over 500 000 projects)
• ScratchEd – Teacher and Presenter Resources
• Learn Scratch – Video Tutorials
• http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Scratch/Book/ (Howard Abrams blog site)
  This site contains a well written book on using Scratch (Download and online)

Calorie Activity

• Activity that demonstrates one method of validating responses.

Scratch Extensions – New Versions by Other Authors (blog site)

• BYOB – A version of Scratch that allows one to create their own blocks (updated – based on Scratch 1.4)
• Some of the features of BYOB (these features are unique to the modified version of Scratch 1.4)
  • custom blocks (functional recursion)
    • includes majority of Scratch 1.4 features (esp. string functions)
    • can open/import any Scratch project
    • arguments now take  both numerical and text input (and reporters)
    • double click on a custom reporter block to show its result
    • the block editor’s answer field includes drag & drop functionality
    • improved debugging functions (error blocks are displayed red)
    • escaping out of infinite atomic loops
    • block editor is resizable
  • nestable sprites (structural recursion)
    • create composite sprites (made out of subsprites)
  • • sprites can be nested infinitely, making them “parts” of more complex simulations
    • subsprites follow their owner’s motion, heading, resizing and graphical effects, and serve as their owner’s extended sensors
    • subsprites can be set to follow their owner’s rotation, or to rotate independently
  • other
    • share sprites in a mesh network (this includes nested sprites)
    • built-in compiler lets you convert any Scratch/BYOB project into an .exe (Windows only)
    • autoscrolling
    • scrolling by dragging
    • undo

Simple Geometry – Create a Square (No Repeat)

Simple Geometry – Create a Square (With Repeat)

Extensions:

http://blogs.wsd1.org/etr/files/square-circle-1024x768.flv

Download the video 1024 x 768 – 10 mb

Click to view image.

http://blogs.wsd1.org/etr/files/square-circle-extension.flv

Download the video 1024 x 768 – 2 mb

Click to view image.

Slide Show

Download:

• Slide Show

Stage 1 - Add Images

Stage 2 - Script

Stage 3 - Add Sound

Set Variables

Next Slide Button

Previous Slide Button

Go To First Slide

• Scratch Programming – Stop Motion Animation
  • Day Dream – (Download from WSD)
  • stop motion; cars racin – (Download from WSD)