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Open Source Computing

Submitted by mberry on Thu, 14/10/2010 - 7:55pm

What follows are notes from a brief presentation to the Computing at School working group meeting in Cambridge this morning.

 It has often seemed to me, and thus I’m sure others, that open source tools and methods provide a diverse and fertile ecosystem in which the craft of programming might be mastered and computer science studied. My own discipline is education rather than computing, but I hope some of the following aspects might illustrate the opportunities which open source offers for those concerned to encourage computing at school. 

Using Scratch in class to teach programming.

By Admin - Posted on June 21st, 2010

By Amanda Wilson

Amanda is soon to graduate as an honours student in Computing at Glasgow Caledonian University.  Here, she describes work with primary school children to enable them to understand a bit more about computing using the open source Scratch programming language and environment.

For one hour a week over eight weeks I taught Scratch to two classes of primary 4/key stage 2(average age 8 years) children. The purpose of these lessons was mainly to show that Scratch could be used to introduce children to programming as part of their school curriculum.  The lessons given were devised by myself and were constructed around the new curriculum for excellence guidelines(being introduced in Scotland this year) as well as some basic programming concepts.  The main aim of these lessons was to see if the children would learn from using Scratch as well as seeing how enjoyable the lessons were for the children and to see how the teachers rated the lessons.

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Computing at School Teachers' Conference

Submitted by Admin on Wed, 19/05/2010 - 4:12pm
Date: 
09/07/2010

From http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/index.php?p=conf2010

"I learnt more and connected with more interesting people than on any course that my school has previously forked out hundreds of pounds for"
(Feedback from 2009 CAS Teacher Conference)

THE VENUE

University of Birmingham

 

WHAT DATES

Thursday 8th July 7pm-10pm - Informal Reception

Scratch Day

Submitted by Admin on Fri, 23/04/2010 - 7:03am
Date: 
22/05/2010

From http://day.scratch.mit.edu/

What's on your bookshelf?

By Admin - Posted on March 8th, 2010

Packt publishing have a rather nice line in technical guides to a wide range of software applications, with a particularly strong list of open source titles. A couple of new titles look interesting, and I hope to include reviews when I've had chance to read them. 

Scratch bookMichael Badger's Scratch 1.4: Beginner's Guide, covers the basics of Scratch, covering some elementary programming concepts in the process: "This book provides teachers, parents, and new programmers with a guided tour of Scratch's features by creating projects that can be shared, remixed, and improved upon in your own lesson plans. Soon you will be creating games, stories, and animations by snapping blocks of "code" together." [Sample chapter]

maharaAlso of interest is a book, Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolios by community member and unconference presenter Glenys Bradbury and others introducing Mahara, the popular e-portfolio, blogging, social networking software that, thanks to single sign on with Moodle, is the platform of choice for many institutions: "This book will introduce to the exciting features of Mahara framework and help you develop a feature-rich e-portfolio for yourself." [Sample chapter]

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Creative Computing and Open Source: BETT Seminar

Submitted by Admin on Tue, 08/12/2009 - 9:05am
Date: 
13/01/2010

Open Source Schools will be presenting a BETT seminar on 'Creative Computing with Open Source' at 15:45 on Wednesday 13th January. We will showcase a number of case studies about how school students are learning to program and contribute to the development of open source projects using a range of free, downloadable tools. Examples range from Scratch programming in primary schools, through Greenfoot in the secondary curriculum to the development of modules in PHP for web-based applications such as Moodle.

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Sugar on a Stick

Submitted by mberry on Fri, 24/04/2009 - 6:32pm

Sugar, the operating system and GUI for OLPC's truly innovative XO-1 laptops is now available, in beta at least, as a bootable USB stick, allowing any netbook, laptop or desktop to run this amazing re-interpretation of educational computing.

Sugar is built on the idea of activities rather than programs, with an interface designed to be 'discoverable', ie one which children can learn through play and experimentation. Sugar also affords a social experience of computing, as activities are sharable with other students using the same mesh server, thus allowing collaborative text editing, browsing, graphics and indeed programming.

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Scratch programming for primaries

Submitted by mberry on Mon, 20/04/2009 - 3:33pm
Session style: 
Presentation

A quick introduction to the Scratch programming language showcasing some work at primary level.

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