For parents, educators and students to discuss tech education for kids, best practices for teaching coding & engineering design to kids & emerging technology trends
Before you get started, let’s talk a little bit about why creating your own avatar on Facebook has taken off. Everyone is sitting at home looking for something fun to do. What could be more engaging than creating a digital version of yourself? For those of us who are old enough to have seen the movie avatar, this exercise is especially nostalgic.Certainly if Facebook wanted to, they could have ...
One of the great things about technology is that it is all around us. At times, this omnipresence can make us feel like technology rules our lives and that of our kids. Other times, you realize that technology has made a dramatic leap in terms of capability & that wow factor!Augmented reality is a technology that we have been excited about the potential for some time. In fact, we even wrote...
Animations are a great way to level up projects. Great animations can also be used to extend a project to create more realistic looking characters or action sequences. However, there are times when you want to have an animation be the entire focal point of a project.In this tutorial, we will go through how to create a flower animation in Scratch. Estimated tutorial time: 45-60 minutes. Below is...
While we often focus on making sure that we are programming character movement along with the subsequent events and actions to simulate interactive game play, visual effects are also an important element of making great projects. A simple effect that makes your project more realistic will provide more enjoyment to the user and more satisfaction to the developer. Often it can take just as much t...
While we often focus on making sure that we are programming character movement along with the subsequent events and actions to simulate interactive game play, visual effects are also an important element of making great projects. A simple effect that makes your project more realistic will provide more enjoyment to the user and more satisfaction to the developer. Often it can take just as much t...
One of the key skills necessary when building projects is introducing events and actions. One of the most popular types of events is collisions. There are times when you want the character to have a certain behavior when it collides into another character, other times you want the character’s behavior to be based on an interaction with a specific color and other times you want behavior to be ba...
For those who grew up playing video games, there are key elements of gaming that you may not often consider - coin animations. The movement and the sounds associated with activity in a video game is an important part of the user experience. In this tutorial, we will go through how to create different coin animations using Scratch. Estimated tutorial time: 60-75 minutes.Below is a preview of the...
One of the key skills necessary when building projects is using the right type of controls for the character. There are times when you want the character to be controlled by the keyboard, other times you want the character’s movement to be automatic and other times you want a character to be based on how the mouse moves.In this tutorial, we will go through how to create the different character ...