With great skill and technical ability, Marc Grossman shared applications and his web camera to share his experiences and knowledge in the use of many block computing tools:- Scratch 2.0 (which is now browser based), MS Kodu, Makey Makey, MIT App Inventor etc. Marc compared old coding with the new method using blocks in Scratch and demonstrated many of Scratch 2.0′s new features – swipe features in video, new blocks, more sprites, variables that can be shared in the cloud, help! etc
Here is the link to the recording. Alternatively, you can view the movie format created by @shamblesguru (Thanks Chris)
The webcam showed a banana, makey makey (an invention kit) and Scratch code to demonstrate what could be done with makey makey. The makey makey creates a circuit, the banana conducts. A quick demo of making a simple game with MS Kodu was given (this may load in a flakey fashion in the recording as it has high resolution graphics.) MIT App Inventor seemed a user friendly app creator. Marc again effectively used his webcam to use his phone to read the resultant qr code and add his app to his phone. Thanks Marc for a fascinating session.
Marc shared the following links:-
- Kodu Game Lab
- a great book MS Kodu for Kids or (MS Kodu for Kids from Amazon)
- The Code Club about to go global
- Marc’s programming site
- Scratch Jnr
- The How to Makey Makey
- MIT App Inventor (requires a google account)
- Mic’s scratch profile
- Video tutorial by Mic on Kodu Basic Programming
- Scratch video example Swat Louie the Fly
- app inventor allows the Lego Mindstorms settings
- iOS app Hopscotch is similar to Scratch but much more basic
- pico boards as an alternative to makey makey
- tynker - like Scratch but it works on iPads
