One pretty standard piece of inventory in a Maker Space seems to be a product called MaKey MaKey. I posted about the MaKey MaKey and its potential for creativity in April of this year. If you ever see one demonstrated, chances are that someone will be using it to play a banana piano, or a … Read more
This summer, some other GT teachers and I got together to host some free online classes through Edmodo for our 3rd-5th graders. My class is called, “Make a Theme Park.” Each week, the students are invited to make something for a theme park that they have imagined. For the 1st week, the challenge was to build … Read more
Yesterday I mentioned the free online course being offered by Mitch Resnick and his colleagues at the M.I.T. Media Lab called, “Learning Creative Learning.” It starts today, so check out my post if you are interested – no registration required! Mitch Resnick, of course, is one of the creators of Scratch, a great (and also … Read more
You might be familiar with Mitch Resnick, one of the co-creators of the Scratch programming language, and a professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab. I’ve talked about teaching kids how to program quite a bit on this blog, and featured a T.E.D. talk presented by Mitch Resnick on this topic in one of my posts. … Read more
Well, I finally did it. With the help of: an Hour of Code Tutorial, a 3rd grader who knows what he’s doing, and what I learned from auditing a class that my daughter took, I finally felt somewhat ready to try Scratch, the free M.I.T. programming language available on the web, with my 3rd grade … Read more
If you haven’t signed up to participate in this week’s Hour of Code, it’s not too late. And, even if you don’t find it possible to get involved this week, I urge you to take a look at all of the wonderful resources. Consider showing your students the basics of programming, and let them take it … Read more