How much game programming can you do in an hour's lesson? Even Scratch, used at our local school, takes an age to get the loop timings and event handling right. My little'un soon got bored of that..
Well, perhaps you should try AgentSheets instead. Its programming approach is quite different. You can look at the research but with AgentSheets kids with no programming background make their first complete PLAYABLE game in a couple of hours. From that, they move on to more sophisticated games and simulations including advanced AI with collaboration and competition models.
How to make programming work in schools: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/SIGCSE10-repenning.pdf
python is a great programming language but to suggest to use it at the middle school level in required courses does not make a lot of sense. We are not talking about the Friday afternoon computer club here.
While programming is part of the picture the more general goal is to teach computational thinking. The skills acquired when designing games or building computational science simulations have little to do with current high school level AP CS course offerings. The real idea is to provide general 21 Century computing skills relevant to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) including: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_science#Related_fields
The objective of the project is to motivate middle school kids in computer science through game design. Have you stepped into a middle school recently? I think you would hold kid's attention for about 2 minutes with gripping stories of relational data bases.
Yes, if programming is an isolated activity done only in the computer class then this could be the result. But if one teaches more general notions such as computational thinking in a way that they become relevant to science, math and even art then computing education becomes a literacy relevant to many aspects of education. A crazy dream, you may comment, but for instance one of the school participating in the Scalable Game Design project has become THE US National Middle school of 2011 in part because they have shifted to this new model of integrating computing into their math and science courses very successfully. It can be done!
I agree, both sides are asshats. The customer for disturbing the movie, and the management for not [...] giving her a refund
That would be an absurd management policy. With this kind of policy in place people, after, say, watching the first 20 minutes of a movie, and realizing they do not like that movie could just start to text in the hope to get thrown out of the theater (or get at least some texting done) and get their money back. That would make NO sense whatsoever and would be terrible for the audience.
Would be nice if people writing these "articles" would do just a little bit of background research. Drag and drop end-user programming is ancient, e.g., AgentSheets 15 years ago: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/VL96.pdf (drag and drop even from a browser, creating applets,...). This precedes some of the systems mentioned not only by years but by a decade.
More recently, CyberCollage has drag and drop programming based on HTML5, runs games/simulations probably much faster than any of the tools mentioned (try game of life: http://www.inf.usi.ch/phd/ahmadi/rm/index.html) has already been very successfully tested with kids in schools, AND is MULTI user: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/iseud2011_repenning_submission.pdf
wow, great insight! My advice to you: buy one. Meanwhile, everybody else who learned in the last 20 years that user experience is more than some stats on a spec sheet may go ahead and get an iPad...
I would be happy if the new version is going to fix the mindbogglingly confusing GUI that Blender has. The version migration from 2.56?? to 2.57 is not exactly very suggestive for fundamental user interface improvements. If it actually would be then somebody really missed out on a great opportunity to create a, say, 3.0 release? People use Blender in spite, not because, of its user interface. Amazing!
yes true: if you strap down the chip with sufficient pressure the paste will just overflow. That may look a bit messy but unless you started with about a gallon this is completely OK.
> Time will tell if the gobs of thermal paste applied to the CPU and GPU will cause overheating issues down the road,' iFixit said
The only problem with thermal paste is if there NOT ENOUGH. Thermal paste increases thermal conductivity between chip and heat sink. Not having it would be a problem. Too much may, worst case scenario, look a bit sloppy.
This was as ready to use as some of the early gliders "flying" for about 20 feet and then breaking into pieces. Pad computing is not about hardware alone. It is about the whole user experience including useful and meaningful activities. Remember, before the Web, computers were not that useful to many people. However, this as well as the Newton were important milestones heading in the right direction.
As Apple did not invent the idea of Pad computing, I'm quite certain there would have been others to market.
Real invention includes the combination of getting an idea AND implementing it. Others may have had similar ideas but they did not create truly usable implementations. Many people, including Leonardo da Vinci, invented the airplane but in the end the real credit, and deservedly so, got to the people who made the airplane actually FLY. Similarly, Apple really DID invent Pad computing.
In our project we get > 50% girls when doing scalable game design:
http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/
because the curriculum is simple enough for teachers to do, the kids enjoy it and they can transfer their skills from game design to science simulations.
Re:"Alice" one of the best learning languages toda
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1
> Alice teaches much more modern object-oriented principles that would be much more useful than BASIC or LISP to a > modern programming student
object-oriented principles such as what? You cannot seriously put BASIC and Lisp into one sentence. Have you even looked at the object system of Common Lisp (CLOS) ? It is quit a bit more powerful than Alice/Java OOP. Please provide a list of object-oriented principles that Alice teaches that Lisp would not.
For the most part we fail to tell people WHY they should care about math. Early on, in public schools, approaches such as connected math, come up with all these cute stories that most students do not really care about. In the context of our Scalable Game Design project we teach middle school kids how to make games. Suddenly we get these 12 year old kids who NEED to be able to build better AI into their games. The teacher indicated that these kids do not care about math. One week later they build video games implementing sophisticated AI based on diffusion equations and actually start to enjoy math. Why? Because, for the first time in their life math actually solves THEIR problem and not the one made up by the teacher or the text book.
"Excuse me, I need better AI!" http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/SIGGRAPH_06_Excuseme.pdf
One can certainly do better than MS Office application training to get kids excited about computer science. Game design, if done right, works well in public schools and after school programs.
Have a look at Scalable Game Design using AgentSheets http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/
Check out the data (over 78% of the middle school girls want to continue). Even see the conservative TX Congressman McCaul comment on game design.
Best of all, in addition to evaluate motivational issues we can now even begin to measure computational thinking http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/VL10comp_thinking.pdf
show me one... just one actual game, not just a silly animation of a game built in Alice. Try making the simplest game such as say, Pac-man. Good luck with that.
Slashdot Mirror
How much game programming can you do in an hour's lesson? Even Scratch, used at our local school, takes an age to get the loop timings and event handling right. My little'un soon got bored of that..
Well, perhaps you should try AgentSheets instead. Its programming approach is quite different. You can look at the research but with AgentSheets kids with no programming background make their first complete PLAYABLE game in a couple of hours. From that, they move on to more sophisticated games and simulations including advanced AI with collaboration and competition models. How to make programming work in schools: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/SIGCSE10-repenning.pdf
python is a great programming language but to suggest to use it at the middle school level in required courses does not make a lot of sense. We are not talking about the Friday afternoon computer club here.
While programming is part of the picture the more general goal is to teach computational thinking. The skills acquired when designing games or building computational science simulations have little to do with current high school level AP CS course offerings. The real idea is to provide general 21 Century computing skills relevant to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) including: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_science#Related_fields
The objective of the project is to motivate middle school kids in computer science through game design. Have you stepped into a middle school recently? I think you would hold kid's attention for about 2 minutes with gripping stories of relational data bases.
Yes, if programming is an isolated activity done only in the computer class then this could be the result. But if one teaches more general notions such as computational thinking in a way that they become relevant to science, math and even art then computing education becomes a literacy relevant to many aspects of education. A crazy dream, you may comment, but for instance one of the school participating in the Scalable Game Design project has become THE US National Middle school of 2011 in part because they have shifted to this new model of integrating computing into their math and science courses very successfully. It can be done!
I agree, both sides are asshats. The customer for disturbing the movie, and the management for not [...] giving her a refund
That would be an absurd management policy. With this kind of policy in place people, after, say, watching the first 20 minutes of a movie, and realizing they do not like that movie could just start to text in the hope to get thrown out of the theater (or get at least some texting done) and get their money back. That would make NO sense whatsoever and would be terrible for the audience.
They are quite conservative, but very serious about their defence.
Conservative in what sense? Would you say they are more conservative than, say, the USA?
Would be nice if people writing these "articles" would do just a little bit of background research. Drag and drop end-user programming is ancient, e.g., AgentSheets 15 years ago: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/VL96.pdf (drag and drop even from a browser, creating applets, ...). This precedes some of the systems mentioned not only by years but by a decade.
More recently, CyberCollage has drag and drop programming based on HTML5, runs games/simulations probably much faster than any of the tools mentioned (try game of life: http://www.inf.usi.ch/phd/ahmadi/rm/index.html) has already been very successfully tested with kids in schools, AND is MULTI user: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/iseud2011_repenning_submission.pdf
wow, great insight! My advice to you: buy one. Meanwhile, everybody else who learned in the last 20 years that user experience is more than some stats on a spec sheet may go ahead and get an iPad...
To claim that something which is obviously usable by millions is simply wrong just has to be simply wrong.
I would be happy if the new version is going to fix the mindbogglingly confusing GUI that Blender has. The version migration from 2.56?? to 2.57 is not exactly very suggestive for fundamental user interface improvements. If it actually would be then somebody really missed out on a great opportunity to create a, say, 3.0 release? People use Blender in spite, not because, of its user interface. Amazing!
A case made on when NOT to use objects and how to deal with a high degree of parallelism: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/OOPSLA06antiobjects.pdf
yes true: if you strap down the chip with sufficient pressure the paste will just overflow. That may look a bit messy but unless you started with about a gallon this is completely OK.
> Time will tell if the gobs of thermal paste applied to the CPU and GPU will cause overheating issues down the road,' iFixit said The only problem with thermal paste is if there NOT ENOUGH. Thermal paste increases thermal conductivity between chip and heat sink. Not having it would be a problem. Too much may, worst case scenario, look a bit sloppy.
This was as ready to use as some of the early gliders "flying" for about 20 feet and then breaking into pieces. Pad computing is not about hardware alone. It is about the whole user experience including useful and meaningful activities. Remember, before the Web, computers were not that useful to many people. However, this as well as the Newton were important milestones heading in the right direction.
As Apple did not invent the idea of Pad computing, I'm quite certain there would have been others to market.
Real invention includes the combination of getting an idea AND implementing it. Others may have had similar ideas but they did not create truly usable implementations. Many people, including Leonardo da Vinci, invented the airplane but in the end the real credit, and deservedly so, got to the people who made the airplane actually FLY. Similarly, Apple really DID invent Pad computing.
In our project we get > 50% girls when doing scalable game design: http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/ because the curriculum is simple enough for teachers to do, the kids enjoy it and they can transfer their skills from game design to science simulations.
> Alice teaches much more modern object-oriented principles that would be much more useful than BASIC or LISP to a > modern programming student object-oriented principles such as what? You cannot seriously put BASIC and Lisp into one sentence. Have you even looked at the object system of Common Lisp (CLOS) ? It is quit a bit more powerful than Alice/Java OOP. Please provide a list of object-oriented principles that Alice teaches that Lisp would not.
For the most part we fail to tell people WHY they should care about math. Early on, in public schools, approaches such as connected math, come up with all these cute stories that most students do not really care about. In the context of our Scalable Game Design project we teach middle school kids how to make games. Suddenly we get these 12 year old kids who NEED to be able to build better AI into their games. The teacher indicated that these kids do not care about math. One week later they build video games implementing sophisticated AI based on diffusion equations and actually start to enjoy math. Why? Because, for the first time in their life math actually solves THEIR problem and not the one made up by the teacher or the text book. "Excuse me, I need better AI!" http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/SIGGRAPH_06_Excuseme.pdf
One can certainly do better than MS Office application training to get kids excited about computer science. Game design, if done right, works well in public schools and after school programs. Have a look at Scalable Game Design using AgentSheets http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/ Check out the data (over 78% of the middle school girls want to continue). Even see the conservative TX Congressman McCaul comment on game design. Best of all, in addition to evaluate motivational issues we can now even begin to measure computational thinking http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/VL10comp_thinking.pdf
WAS fine! It was acquired by Google for the Wave and the Etherpad service closed.
how about: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/SIGCSE10-repenning.pdf
show me one... just one actual game, not just a silly animation of a game built in Alice. Try making the simplest game such as say, Pac-man. Good luck with that.
If you really want the kids to create an actual game and not just a couple of character moving around on the screen making speech bubble try http://www.agentsheets.com/ Does it work? Look here: http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/gamewiki/images/b/b2/Scalable_Game_Design_summary.pdf
here is a checklist for getting kids into programming even in schools: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/SIGCSE10-repenning.pdf