Resources regarding computer science and education within the field.
It’s not the first time I have extolled the virtues of Scratch. It is a fantastic platform by which people can be introduced into programming. I fancied doing something creative this evening and playing about in Scratch. I was going to make a little game but then I thought about illustrating an aspect of the Collatz conjecture in Scratch.
Read moreQuite often Windows (even prev. versions) would lose the default application association to open image files (e.g. JPG) with Windows Picture Viewer. When I right-click and go to open with…, the application isn’t shown. The only fix I know is to edit the registry.
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Hedgehogs are adorable little creatures. I acknowledge that all of God’s creation deserves awe and respect and that it’s important to appreciate that every species has a valid role to play in our ecosystem. But hedgehogs, well, they’re lovely aren’t they? Sadly they’re endangered in the UK so I set about to help out some of these prickly little friends.
Read moreI’ve been running out of space on my boot drive, a 250 GB SSD, but I’m reluctant to upgrade it with another SSD because I am overhauling my system shortly and will go NVMe rather than SATA. However, it does mean I have to keep on top of things so I don’t get the dreaded error about scratch disks being full in Photoshop. One of those things is the enormous pagefile.sys that Windows keeps generating.
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I have been interested in chaos for a long time. I like swarms – they are chaotic. Each individual in a swarm has a very simple set of rules to follow but overall, the swarm seems to move in a coordinated fashion. As such, I wanted to provide a simple and visual explanation of swarm behaviour that was accessible for people to interact with – MIT’s Scratch seemed the ideal platform then.
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The European Space Agency confirmed confirmed successful code execution on board the ISS – code produced by four young girls in a Code Club I run.
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A colleague emailed me a link to a Scratch project where somebody had done a pandemic simulator so I thought I would have a try. I liked the idea but I wanted to have a go but coding from ‘scratch’ (no pun intended).
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I run an after-school code club, which is attended by pupils from a few different year groups. I am impressed by what a team of four girls have achieved (aged 11-13). They’ve written code in Python that will run on a Raspberry Pi in the International Space Station (ISS) next year.
Read moreThe Micro:bit website is an awesome place to start learning to code. You can create your own programs such as a digital compass through to mini-games. I’ve included an example here. It’s very simple and the Micro:bit has a lot more capabilities that can be used (compass, radio, bluetooth, accelerometer etc.)
Read moreSEE Resources: Powerpoint and Worksheet
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