Blogs

My 6 year old came up with this one: invite your friends to each add a character to a game, and see what happens.

"Is the United States about a tenth of the world?" Believe or not, my almost-six year old asked this last night. Her big sisters have been doing a lot of fractions, and we talk about sizes of things.

I wasn't sure.

Scratch from MIT : http://scratch.mit.edu is a graphical interface for creating logical object-oriented programs, quickly and easily. I read a review of it in MAKE Magazine some months ago and finally tried it out. Looks extremely promising, and its easy to put together a simple intelligent animation in minutes. (well, a bit more for reading the instructions - but after I read them it didn't take long)

I like to start off teaching Javascript, because everyone with a computer has all the tools you need: a browser and a text editor. Its pretty easy to have kids change the screen color, make pop-ups appear, take user input and munge it around. But kids want to program games, so I'm considering Flash. In the meantime, here is a full-fledged Javascript game we may try to edit.

http://code.google.com/p/js-blaster/

This is a blog post rather than a lesson plan, as we haven't tried it out yet!

We looked at several rock identification websites, this was the most immediately useful for simple identification of common rocks: http://saltthesandbox.org/rocks/names.htm