I’ve been reading about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project and especially about their new user interface, Sugar. I’m very impressed with the thinking that’s gone into this machine to make it suitable for classrooms. For me, the ideal classroom is filled with kids working on projects and learning as they go. As they figure something out, [...]
Some of my students have been using Comic Life to work on storytelling. I was inspired to use comics with my students by my friend Sebastian Mondrone who is an amazingly creative guy and a comic author himself. Comics are a great way to work on creative writing at a younger age because the visuals make it compelling, and [...]
I went to my first meeting of dorkbot on Wednesday. Dorkbot has a great motto: “people doing strange things with electricity.” Who can resist the temptation of such an intriguing description? Dorkbot is a series of monthly meetings where a few people demonstrate their inventions and take questions. My favorite was Bret Doar demonstrating some rickety devices [...]
Congratulations to Julia, Will, and Eric — winners of the Master Robot Builder award. AMNH’s Robotics Camp studied mechanical engineering, a little computer programming, and learned something about teamwork and communication. What a fun week it was.
I have released my learning tool, MakeBot, as open-source software. There is a new website: stratotools.python-hosting.com which holds all the source-code for the tools developed here. The latest addition is MoonUnit, a 3D graphics library. It’s under development for courses I will give this summer. So far you can draw spheres, boxes, cylinders and cones in 3D. [...]
By popular request, we are adding one additional summer day-camp for Video Game Programming for Kids. This will be an advanced session for students who have already taken our at least one LRY course, or have some previous programming experience. The camp will be Monday-Friday, 9am-3pm, for one week. That’s 30 hours of heavy-duty game building [...]
Mark Shuttleworth, software engineer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist from South Africa, is funding work on developing software tools to help education, especially analytical thinking and problem solving. Here’s what he has to say:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/26
This is exactly what I’m interested in, so I couldn’t help adding my two cents.
The Lab School’s Parent’s Association is now hosting my Video Game Programming for Kids course after school. Apparently there was a lot of demand for the course — Ms. Cohen-Wolf said kids have been asking for something like this for years. We even bought three extra laptops so we could fit in all the students who wanted [...]
February 2006 - One of my good friends here in New York is Duncan, who I’ve known since our days in the mid-90’s writing Star Wars games at LucasArts. His friend started the company GameLab which writes great smallish games. They do lots of short games — games for when you have an extra 15 minutes to waste, [...]
Copyright © 2006 Stratolab
