Extras

On this page, we have included some supplementary materials that we have used in previous workshops. These may be useful if you are looking for more activity ideas.

Building Mobile Apps with AppInventor

In previous years’ workshops we have included a “Building Mobile with AppInventor” activity. If you are interested in using AppInventor in your classroom, the presentation, workshop tutorials and some useful links from last year’s AppInventor session are available on this page.

My Robotic Friends

My Robotic Friends is an unplugged activity developed by Thinkersmith. In this activity some students (the “programmers”) write instructions for other students, who act like robots, to follow in order to build a stack of cups. The purpose of this activity is to demonstrate the need for precise instructions when programming but all you need to run it is some plastic cups!

The original version of the activity is available for download here.

This video shows some examples of the activity in action.

General Purpose Programming

One of the questions we are commonly asked at workshops is what students should learn if they have already “mastered” Scratch. Students aren’t expected to start learning general-purpose languages until Year 7 & 8 but some of your students may be enthusiastic about moving onto these or want to create programs that go beyond what Scratch allows them to do.

It can be overwhelming moving from visual programming languages to general-purpose languages. There are many resources available for learning general-purpose languages but the best resources (and language) for learning really depend on what you would like to create.

We have included some material about general-purpose languages on this page, which has some advice about which language to learn. The included tutorial focuses on Sonic Pi, a programming environment where you create music with code written in the Ruby language