By Michael, on November 29th, 2005%
Let’s be honest… learning the basic concepts of computer programming is really hard for most people. Sure, once you’ve put in the hard yards you can create lots of fun and interesting applications, but when you’re learning the basics, such as looping, conditional statements, objects and methods, it can be pretty darn boring (and abstract and demotivating and confusing and … etc.)
Last week, thanks to Jude Cooke and Leigh Blackall, I had a chance to introduce computer programming to a bunch of Year 10 students from Katoomba high. Instead of my normal “robot” introduction (you know, I’m the robot, you’ve gotta give me instructions to pick up stuff), I used a great Open Source (edit: Alice is not actually Open Source, but has a free license agreement) application called Alice, and they actually enjoyed learning the basics of computer programming!
Continue reading An intro to programming by Alice
By Michael, on November 16th, 2005%
After the TALO Swap/meet the other week, we got talking in our Web Design class about the possibility of using a First-person shooter to learn Web Design. How would it work? How could people learn about Web Design while running around shooting people?
It just so happened that one of the members of our class, Edward Smith, has a bit of a background in gaming and was really excited about the idea. A few weeks later, he released the first version of Silence of the Terminals! (SOTT for short.)
Continue reading Gaming to learn!
By Michael, on November 2nd, 2005%
It’s always exciting for me to discover someone else who shares similar ideas about learning and facilitation…. even more so when that someone has more experience that I can learn from! Two weeks ago after our Teaching is Dead…long live Learning workshop, I had the opportunity to hear Liz Renshaw and Gregor Mackenzie talk about their Personalised Learning project… and I sat their nodding my head throughout ’til my neck got sore! Just now I’ve watched Robin Petterd’s demonstration Two stories: Supporting project based learning in multimedia design – and I’m getting a sore neck once more…
Continue reading Robin’s project-based multimedia class
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