Article: Forget Foreign Languages and Music. Teach Our Kids to Code

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/ap_code/

An article about computer scientist J. Paul Gibson and his efforts to teach coding to kids.

A supercomputer in your pocket [infographic]

http://images.intomobile.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Supercomputer-In-Your-Pocket.jpg

 

“A new infographic from FoneBank looks at the modern mobile gadgets and compares them with supercomputers from decades ago. You’ll also learn something about major milestones, cost and capabilities, causes and consequences, and what the future holds.”

Construct 2 is a powerful ground breaking HTML5 game creator designed specifically for 2D games

https://www.scirra.com/construct2

From their site:

Make your game do what it needs to do in a visual and human readable way with the powerful event system.

There’s no need to memorise cryptic languages. Focus on what really matters: designing your game!

It’s ideal for beginners, and powerful enough to let experts prototype faster than ever before.

Robot Turtles… teaches programming fundamentals

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danshapiro/robot-turtles-the-board-game-for-little-programmer

Robot Turtles is a board game you play with your favorite 3-8 year old. It sneakily teaches programming fundamentals

Teach kids programming: A collection of resources

https://medium.com/p/a2dc04ea9529

From the site:

“These resources are meant for teachers and parents who want to have their children fall in love with computers and see the magic of programming.

I’m staying away from philosophical debates of whether kids should learn to program, when they should start and other such topics. I know this — I fell in love with computers in 3rd grade (a beautiful ZX Spectrum), and I want to share the joy of programming with others.

I’ve chosen in this list to be quite comprehensive in listing all resources — but also choosy to restricting this to things I found useful & of high quality.”

Beaver Computing Challenge

http://www.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/bcc.html

The Beaver Computing Challenge (BCC) introduces computer science to students. It is designed to get students with little or no previous experience excited about computing

123D Circuits

http://blog.123dapp.com/2013/09/introducing-123d-circuits

Free circuit design Web app.

Here are some of the most compelling features:

• Virtual breadboard based design, allowing to build and experiment with circuits just as you would in real life.
• You can add an Arduino to your design, and edit the code right in your browser.
• Real-time and interactive simulation of both your Arduino code and the circuit attached to it.
• Full collaborative editing (think of Google Docs for electronics).
• Powerful yet easy component editor, making it super easy to add new components to the shared library.

Kojo – Learning Environment

http://www.kogics.net/kojo

It has many different features that enable play, exploration, creation, and learning in the areas of:

Computer Programming
Math and Science
Systematic and Computational Thinking
Art, Music, and Creative Thinking
Computer and Internet Literacy

Blockly demo

http://blockly-demo.appspot.com/static/apps/code/index.html

This demo makes use of Blockly a web-based, graphical programming editor. Users can drag blocks together to build an application. No typing required.

This is a very cool demo because you can drag and drop blocks and then see the equivalent in JavaScript, Python and XML !

Online Python Tutor extension for the IPython shell

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3oarDuZPL0

An IPython extension that visualizes each executed Python statement in Online Python Tutor running on a local web server. Useful for teaching beginners on the interactive shell.