Tag Archives: Talk

Bringing the Beauty and Joy of Computing to the World via edX

Presenter(s): Dan Garcia, Brian Harvey, Jens Moenig, Michael Ball (US)

Summary: After five years of offering professional development to over 200 high school teachers, the Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) team decided to embark on a project with global reach: building a massive open online course (MOOC) for their BJC course, complete with autograding, peer grading, inspiring videos, quizzes, and a learning community. This talk will offer a sneak peek;it launches Fall 2015.

Type of participation: Talk

Project Spark: How building 3D fantasy worlds can be the perfect introduction to block based coding.

Presenter(s): Stephen Howell, Scott Blackwell (IE)

Summary: Project Spark is like Scratch; a powerful, yet simple way to build and play your own worlds, stories and games. Project Spark is developed by Microsoft, and is an evolution of Kodu. This presentation will show how reprogramming an angry goblin to be your best friend can teach boolean logic while also being incredibly awesome. We will also showcase the free video course we made for Spark.

Type of participation: Talk

The new ‘Kinect 2 Scratch’, a toolkit for developing Natural User Interface games in Scratch 2.0 using the new Kinect v2.

Presenter(s): Stephen Howell and Scott Blackwell (IE)

Summary: We present the new Kinect 2 Scratch which connects Scratch 1.4/2.0 & Kinect v1/v2 (for Xbox One). The original software was released in January 2011, and has been downloaded thousands of times and used worldwide. This free software allows anyone code for the body tracking Kinect sensor using Scratch. We will focus on the updated features, supporting educational material and the 2015 schools pilot

Type of participation: Talk

Teaching debugging in Scratch

Presenter(s): Miles Berry (GB)

Summary: After an introduction to the importance of debugging for the development of computational thinking and developing resilience, drawing on the work of Papert, Dweck and others, Miles explores common types of bug in Scratch code, strategies for debugging and approaches to teaching this vital skill in school or clubs. There’ll be ample time for participants to discuss how they tackle debugging.

Type of participation: Talk

Extending Snap! for OOP

Presenter(s): Jens Mönig (CDG Labs), Brian Harvey (UC Berkeley) (DE)

Summary: The next version of Snap! will provide prototypal inheritance, letting students model cascading dynamic bindings for field-variables, custom blocks, sprite attributes and media. With this mechanism students can classify concrete behavioral strains into more abstract prototypes and turn these into powerful classes. Thus, Snap! will be able to support a rigorous introductory OOP curriculum.

Type of participation: Talk

Don’t think like a computer, think like a computer scientist!

Presenter(s): Michael Lodi (IT)

Summary: The importance of computational thinking in computer science education is clear.But it can also teach some very relevant life skills for all, like systematic thinking, decomposition, acceptance of uncertainty of the result, being less ambiguous in giving instruction, paying attention to efficiency, iterate and collaborate.

Type of participation: Talk

Learning with Scratch

Presenter(s): Carlos Luís (PT)

Summary: Our challenge was to develop basic skills in reading, writing, calculating and use of information / communication technology with pedagogical innovations for adults who do not have basic education skills. Interdisciplinary and complementarity assumed a particular teaching experience, with a focus on the use of Scratch to simplifies the creation and manipulation of stories.

IEFP_presentation_holandaCarlosLuis

Type of participation: Talk

EU Code Week

Presenter(s): Alessandro Bogliolo (codeweek.eu, IT)

Summary: 1 week, 38 countries, 3000 activities, 100 000 + participants : EU Code Week 2014 was the biggest celebration of coding across Europe ! EU Code Week is returning this year from 10-18 October 2015, offering even more events for all kinds of groups: from beginners to advanced coders, for everyone from job-seekers looking to learn a new skill to robot fans and girl geeks.

Type of participation: Talk

Africa Code Week 2015

Presenter(s): Roger-Cyr Aplogan (FR)

Summary: Following on from success of last year’s EU Code Week, the initiative is now extending to Africa. From 1-10 October 2015, children and young people are invited and encouraged to experience coding and strengthen their digital skills. NGOs and partners from industry, including key partner SAP, will organise coding workshops with various learning material (incl. Scratch) across 10 African countries.

Type of participation: Talk

Scratch acivities in Hungary

Presenter(s): Zsuzsa Pluhár (HU)

Summary: Scratch is one of the possible tools to learn and teach computational thinking. We have more activities to support teachers and kids using Scratch. We would like to present you our teacher training activities and our tutorials not only for jung programmers but for kids with human interest too and about an Scratch competition for girls in a special program together with an foundation called Skool.

Type of participation: Talk