1. How can I use this in my class? Java for MS in IT students. Wrap GUI around doing some cool picture manipulations, to engage the students. After AP exam, play with sounds for pre-calculus class, working with amplitude. In my Alice class, last quarter is some Java. Could do MediaComp for the Java portion: More interesting and open-ended assignments. Can I use this in AP class? Maybe for array manipulation? Started doing chromakey with intro class. Tried different poster board colors, and had kids figure out which colors worked right. Really engaged students AND VISITORS. Focused on experimentation. Been doing text with Python. Could use image to get different focus in Python. In Middle School, could start with basic use of explore( ) on the caterpillar, to talk about how images are digitized, how pictures are represented on the computer. Please complete evaluation at: http://findings.vtech.sgizmo.com

2. More: How use this in my class? With Alice class, use Python to fill in the end of the year. They want to add sounds, create more things for the catalog. In AP course, after exam, maybe use data structures or possibly introduce Python MediaComp. Starting a new course, breadth-first, rising 10 th graders. Ways to get into how programming works and how digitizing works. Use it as a hook. Won’t know they’re learning programming unless I tell them, and I won’t. Want to do a lot with matrices, and can do that here. More fun than working through a 2-D array. Get the pre-calc kids recruited early by playing with sounds! Somehow link to CS Ed Week? Maybe make a contest? Art Gallery? Python is great for being memory light and FREE. We’re budget constrained. Doing things here that are hard to do with tools. Writing functions that will do things like fitting pictures into collage. Doing things beyond simple, like removing background noise in a sound.

3. More: How to use in my class? Use as a motivation in existing course. Using turtles to introduce objects. Using image manipulation to introduce loops. Will switch back and forth. Using MIDI to introduce linked lists. Can’t really use this right now. Using an imperative scripting language, where we use mainline and subroutines, rather than objects. Can change frequency of beep in VB, but not read import sounds and manipulate samples. Can definitely do pixels in pictures. MediaComp support is language dependent. Putting this in CS0. Now using Lego Mindstorms. Add some Python in?

4. More: How to use this in my class? What are our computational goals in the different classes? Are we going to run into a problem where students are seeing the exact same thing (decreaseRed?) over and over, in multiple classes at multiple levels? It’s what we did before with prime numbers and fibonacci, just with something more engaging. A big issue here is assessment: How do we assess, assess what we think is important, and assessing similar ways to how students learn. Let’s not teach the way we learned in the 70’s! Maybe we can improve our teaching, when we have good assessment that shows us what’s working and what’s not.

5. More: What can I use in my class? Python lets us do functional, imperative, and object-oriented. What about not learning more but excited? We should be focusing on getting kids to deal with abstraction.