Computer Science Teacher – Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson

http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/

A blog created by a computer science teacher. It seems to be updated very regularly!

Blogs By and For High School Computer Science Teachers

http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2007/12/03/blogs-by-and-for-high-school-computer-science-teachers.aspx

A list of blogs maintained by high school computer science teachers. Should be worth following.

More resources for teaching Scratch

1. http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewforum.php?id=7 – A forum for educators using Scratch. Lots of good thoughts here.

2. http://scratch.mit.edu/videos – intro videos on the main Scratch site. All of them are good and not too long.

3. http://www.funlearning.de/ – Designing Animations and Games – A Creative Introduction to Programming ( translated from German )

4. http://scratch.mit.edu/cards – some simple on page exercises to get them started

5. http://scratch.mit.edu/files/program-concepts-v5.pdf Basic programming concepts and example code demonstrating them. 3 pages.

6. http://learnscratch.org/ – loads of terrific video tutorials showing concepts and projects

Some ideas for projects:

1. Animate your name

2. Make an object dance

Sample projects I noticed:

1. http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/sjhalasz/8560 – simulate gravity and a ball

2. http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/bigB/15121 – PacMan !

3. http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/EdnaC/48110 – Simple moon lander

4. http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/browse/mostvisited – check out the galleries

Scratch resources

Here are some resources for use when teaching Scratch.

1. http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus/scratch_programs/
Some sample programs written by Kevin and Abe Karplus

2. http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~malan/scratch/ – very good intro to Scratch by David Malan

Good history of robots book

http://www.amazon.com/Robots-Science-Fiction-Technological-Revolution/dp/0810959127

Robots: From Science Fiction To Technological Revolution

Large book with lots photos. Looks very good!

Pleo review

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2229235,00.asp

PCMag has one of the first reviews of the new robotic dinosaur

Toyota has unveiled [1]a robot that can play the violin

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=72177

A very impressive demo of a violin playing robot!

Zipcode-searchable database of volunteer opportunities

Nothing to do with computers but if you have a group of young people that you teach computers to, you might also want to have them work together on some volunteer activity.

Do Something
http://www.dosomething.org/
Site creators believe that “young people have the power to make a
difference.” This site gives them tools to do so: ideas, message boards,
info on grants, a zipcode-searchable database of volunteer opportunities,
and more.

Conway’s Game of Life and Cellular Automata

http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html

Conway’s game of life is always a fun thing to show kids learning about computer science.

Here is a nice, simple applet to play around with the Game of Life

http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/

Another good one:

http://vlab.infotech.monash.edu.au/simulations/cellular-automata/game-of-life/

If you really want to keep up with the world of GoL:

http://pentadecathlon.com/lifeNews/index.php

An epidemic simulator

http://vlab.infotech.monash.edu.au/simulations/cellular-automata/epidemic/

Here’s a simple ant colony simulator:

http://vlab.infotech.monash.edu.au/simulations/swarms/ant-sort/

StarLogo resources

Good Ant simulation in the original StarLogo. Good explanation: http://thepangburns.com/jesse/projects/ant_simulation.htm