2009 Log of Lessons and Activities
What we did each day over the six weeks and three periods (in rough form)
- All classes
- 7/21/09
- NASA Apollo source code
- Hello World Collection
- 7/30/09
- Last day open house
- Review of the classes, where to go from here, brief
lesson, lab, goodbye
- Game and Story Programming
- Session 1
- Week 1
- 6/23/09 Introduced Scratch, let kids play with it
- 6/24/09 Car follow a track program. Used GIMP to create
the car.
- 6/25/09 Inkscape, costumes
- Week 2
- 6/30/09 Introduced Alice, had optional Scratch Q & A in
classroom, which about 7 attended period 1, 0 period 2
- 7/1/09 Alice do together and for all in _ together
- 7/2/09 Name Picker quiz, binary lesson from GoogleKO
shirt, Scratch community, cat hikes the canyon sample
- Google SketchUp
- Week 3
- 7/7/09 Broadcast lesson, be aware of Alice tutorial and
examples, QuickQuiz
- 7/8/09 Taught requested topics from student daily reports
- 7/9/09 Lesson, some show and tell, lab time
- Session 2
- Week 1
- 7/14/09 Introduced Scratch, let kids play with it
- 7/15/09 Showed using and exporting from Inkscape, and
into Scratch
- 7/16/09 Pointed out the videos. Gave the shield lesson.
- Week 2
- 7/21/09 Kids tried GIMP and Sketchup, and Alice
- 7/22/09 Alice proximity lesson, QuickQuiz
- 7/23/09 Making music for games, Ethan Kuefner
- Week 3
- 7/28/09
- Lesson: Variables
- Number of lives, score, health, etc.
- Lab: QuickQuiz (mostly period 1)
- 7/29/09
- Option classroom session: create a game
- 4–6 students stayed and we created simple games
- 7/30/09 Last day presentation
- Python Programming
- Session 1
- Week 1
- 6/23/09 Showed sample Python programs, gave Web address,
let them try it out for 15 mins. Neglected to prepare a
shortcut to to the Pygame samples.
- 6/24/09 Explained print, raw_input, variables in more
detail. Most students worked on the aliens Pygame demo
- 6/25/09 Review, questions, Audacity (slow down student’s
name) Inkscape, suggest enhancing the text adventure game
- Week 2
- 6/30/09 random.randint, choice, Q & A, optional Q & A
(maybe 8 attended)
- 7/1/09 TalkingPuffin Twitter client in Scala. We ran tpuf
with Chase’s Twitter account. The simplest possible
Pygame program.
- 7/2/09 Told them I was trying to get @dougw to visit by
vidconf. Long Name Picker quiz, with writing answers to
simple Python problems on board. We need some more work
on fundamentals.
- Week 3
- 7/7/09 Review of if, variables, if, raw_input, QuickQuiz
- 7/8/09 Videoconference visit from Doug Williams from
Twitter, explanation of Pygame program with sprite that
can move to the right. I should have mentioned that
running Pygame programs from Idle can cause hangs. Some
kids needed help creating a folder and downloading the
two files into the folder.
- 7/9/09 Clarification of exporting (not saving) from
Inkscape, how to download SimplePygame.py and graphic
file into new folder and running, not using Idle
- Session 2
- Week 1
- 7/14/09 My web site was down. I rebooted host toward end
of period. Showed lots of example python programs, Idle,
print, raw_input. Not too much accomplished in lab,
without sample programs on Web site.
- 7/15/09 Name picker quiz on print, raw_input. Programming
challenges 1. Many completed all three.
- 7/16/09 Showed video with first challenge answers, and
presented second challenge. Some kids did all challenges.
Many did many.
- Week 2
- 7/21/09
- Show and tell: William G. showed a C++ calculator
program
- Inkscape, GIMP, Google SketchUp
- SimplePygame explanation
- Lab: work on challenges
- 7/22/09
- Loops and xturtle
- Lab
- A boy tried to use an SVG file as a PNG, got no
error message because of IDLE/Pygame conflict
- Students made things with xturtle
- QuickQuiz
- Problem with people using fake names and
writing inappropriate/noisy things. Had to
shut it down.
- 7/23/09 Making music for games, Ethan Kuefner, playing
sound in pygame
- Week 3
- 7/28/09
- Bob Lee videoconference from Google: Android, Google
- William G. contributed a lot to the
discussion/questions
- Considerable interest from others, an informal
poll revealed
- Lesson: Functions and using an interactive debugger
- 7/29/09
- Tor Norbye: JavaFX
- 7/30/09 Last day presentation
