Saturday, March 13, 2010

Drawing on Scratch

I told ITeam members about the enthusiasm that Ms. Loughlin, the Assistant Superintendent of MSAD 75, showed for the generative work that they have been creating with Scratch, SAM, Alice and video. They expressed appreciation for the recognition and seem to be inspired to create more.

Coby created a drawing program that uses the arrow keys to control the "Pen" and a palette to control the colors. If you need instructions to understand how to use it, click on the "Learn more about this project" link.

Learn more about this project.

I tried to adjust the scale of the applet to get the controls to fit within the column width of the Blogger page but it does not scale project as it does images. The layout of the programs that Coby and Scratch designers have used causes some controls to be out-of-sight. I am excited to see that the Scratch programmers are using x-, y-coordinate systems to create and discuss their development strategies. This kind of application of math concepts should serve them well in more formal math and science learning.

Supreme Decision- a learning game

The Learning Games Network will host a session on the new series of games designed to support learning about civics. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor encourages students and teachers to use games to engage in important work through new media. This may interest our students even more because of their opinions about student rights and technology: Supreme Decision.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

ITeam Scratch Programming

Some ITeam members have embraced Scratch as a creative medium. All ITeam members have shown their enthusiasm for the projects. I have encouraged the programmers to share their work at the Scratch site. Coby has shared one of his simple games. Charlie has programmed several but not yet shared any on the Scratch site. Here I test to see whether I can share their work and extend their audiences.

Scratch Project
The simple embed reference is above and the applet embed is below:


applet id="ProjectApplet" style="display: block;" code="ScratchApplet" codebase="http://scratch.mit.edu/static/misc" archive="ScratchApplet.jar" height="387" width="550">/applet> Learn more about this project
It looks as if Blogger won't accept the Applet embed.
Correction: The Blogger Preview did not load the Applet embed when I used the Chrome browser. Now that I have switched to Firefox, it loads the program and starts. Unfortunately, the window is too narrow so the start flag and stop button are hidden out-of-sight. The only way I could stop the program was to leave the page. We'll need some more work on this to find the best ways to share our projects.