Silicon Valley Code Camp : Nov 8th and 9th, 2008

Dave Briccetti

Dave Briccetti Software LLC
About Dave
Software developer with experience in Scala, Python, Java, Linux, networking, and user interfaces; and in many industries including videoconferencing, remote device control, finance, education, publishing, mechanical engineering, semiconductor manufacturing, defense, and telecommunications. Programming teacher with many years of experience teaching from third grade to adult professional.
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Speaking Sessions

  • Teaching Kids Programming with Scratch, Alice and Python

    Not Available x   Room: Not Assigned
    <p>This session, for parents, teachers, and kids, gives an overview of the software Dave Briccetti uses to teach kids in grades 3-12 to program computers: Scratch, Alice, Python, Pygame, GIMP, and Audacity. Dave has been teaching kids programming for many years in several programs, including Diablo Valley College's summer College for Kids grade 4-10 program since 1992.</p> <p> Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web. Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design. </p> <p> Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects. </p><p> In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.</p> <p> If you want to bring a laptop you can follow along. Install at least Scratch and Alice before coming. </p> <ul> <li>http://davebsoft.com/programming-for-kids <li>http://scratch.mit.edu/ <li>http://alice.org/ <li>http://python.org/ <li>http://pygame.org/ </ul> There's an outline of what I covered here: http://briccetti.blogspot.com/2008/11/my-talk-at-silicon-valley-codecamp-on.html