Neat tools you can use in the classroom part 1

A few people have asked me recently for what I'd recommend using to teach children computer science skills, and more specifically how to learn programming. These are also really good ways to get your skills up to scratch as an educator!

1: MIT Scratch - Not the first visual programming tool, but one of the best around now. Kids love it, it teaches the concepts of programming very well, but ultimately it is limited. So you could move onto...

2: Scratch BYOB - Berkley's offshoot of Scratch that allows you to access higher order functions and make scratch more like a modern OO Programming language. Better for older kids.

3: Alice - Alice and Storytelling Alice will take you onto an even higher level. This is a free (again) 3D programming environment that introduces learners to the more complex three dimensional design space and mimics production programming languages like C++ and Java. As Alice has been around a long time, lots of well-developed resources exist to help you out, and the visual, immediate nature of Alice helps keep learners engaged.

4: Python - "Learn to think like a computer scientist"! Python would appear at first as hardcore as any programming language. Certainly the way you create in it is just like the classic languages - you write your scripts in a text editor, and then run them to see the results. Except Python is really easy to work with and much more forgiving than C or its peers. The thing is, it hides massive power under the hood and you could create something as impressive as Facebook or eBay given the time and motivation. (4a would be Ruby on Rails, a great environment for creating Web apps, with the 'Rails' giving you structured support to do common Web stuff like logging in to a site without reinventing the wheel. Favoured by the RAD/Agile Web development industry)

.. to be continued (with some stuff to help teach the fundamentals)

BETT 2012 thoughts

So, the Code-Ed team are back from a successful and incredibly busy BETT 2012 show. We learnt lots, had even more fun and are now thoroughly knackered! I need to extend my thanks to the wonderful kids of Lampton School of Hounslow in West London. What a lovely and hard-working bunch they are! Also thanks to heppell.net, Panasonic, EMAP, Juliette, Stephen, Carole and Stephanie for supporting the project and being wonderful friends throughout the show. A review of the pedagogic findings will follow, and I'll also upload some Scratch projects that the Lampton lot did..

It's not all here!

Some of the work we are doing with Code-ed is on twitter - Code-Ed

On the Heppell.net stand

Posting on the go - here on the world famous Heppell.net stand "new worlds of learning" at the BETT educational trade show. Busy busy busy! (but fun)

BETT postcard

This is the cute little postcard we had on our stand at the BETT show telling the world what we were up to (which was teaching ten 11 year olds how to program in 4 days from scratch, using scratch!)

You can actually send the postcard to someone if you want...

Playing with Scratch and App Inventor

I've been spending a lot of time recently playing with two incredible tools provided by MIT. They are Scratch and App Inventor. Both are based around the idea of making computer programming easier to learn, by 'visualising' the syntax of programming, but keeping the idea of the logic, variables and operators so key to every modern programming language.

Scratch enables you to build beautiful little apps that run on a computer or a browser, (the latter being cleverly packaged up as Flash or Java) and is so accessible it's unreal.

In my mission to try and get kids programming as part of their ICT education, I think both of these tools are just what is needed. Certainly in other countries outside of the UK where I live, many educators and kids are producing wonderful stuff with them.

App Inventor is in a bit of a state of transformation right now and is not publicly accessible, so I'll give an update on that when it settles down, but essentially it takes a lot of the concepts of Scratch and puts them on your Android powered smartphone.