Where it’s at.

Thanks to everyone who left insightful comments on my Face-to-Face post.  After looking into MIT’s App Inventor 2, I’ve decided to end off the year on that platform, as it will make a great foundation for the end-of-year project, which I’d been struggling to wrap my head around.  I plan on following David Wolber’s “Course In a Box”, as it has great starting tutorials and ideas for extensions. It turns out that Android is the most popular platform among my students, so they will be able to use the skills beyond the end of the course if they wish.  Thanks to Ed Hitchcock and Grant Hutcheson for pointing out this platform; it’s far more relevant than Scratch.

Another change that has come from my participation in Cohort 21 is a switch of programming language from Java to Python – I had been toying with the idea for a while, as I know that many introductory courses are taught in Python, and Java has a lot of overhead that confuses new programmers (“Just keep typing ‘static’, kid, and stop asking questions”).  I’ve started learning Python 3 and am finding it to have a nice balance of simplicity and versatility. If anyone has any recommendations for a good introductory text for my students, I’d love to hear about them.  Thanks to Kyle Cardinale for pushing me over the edge on this question.

As far as increasing enrollment goes, I already have a 50% percent increase over this years’ numbers.  I guess news of my charm travels fast.  I haven’t seen any class lists, so I don’t know how many of these people are girls, but I’ll keep you posted.  We haven’t done a lot of planning for our girls’ FLL Robotics team yet, so we’ll have to get on that in the coming months.

Well enough talking about it; I’m going to make a cup of tea and start doing something.  Looking forward to seeing you all soon.