Interesting Links 5 September 2016

It’s Labor Day in the US which means this is the last day of a four day weekend for me. It’s nice to have an extra long weekend this early in the school year. Making the adjustment from summer to back to school takes some work for me.  That doesn’t mean I don’t have links to share though.

Interested in a tool to transition students from Scratch to Java (via Greenfoot), check out this tool : ScratchFoot I don’t use either Java or Scratch much these days so I haven’t tried it but it looks interesting.

ScratchFoot provides a subclass of World and subclass of Actor which make available much of the functionality of Scratch in Greenfoot.
Using ScratchFoot, you should be able to convert many Scratch programs to use Greenfoot. This may be useful for

• overcoming limitations of Scratch. E.g., when the Scratch canvas is just too small for your application, or when Scratch starts running too slowly because you have so many scripts running.
• making the transition from the simple (and wonderful) world of Scratch to the more real world of Java programming.

Federal Aid for Code Schools - is this a good thing?  A lot of people seem to think it is. Mike Zamansky is someone I can always could on to give a contrary view of things for balance.

The Nerdy Teacher: was recommending Kano last week.   Honestly I don't think I "get it." The Kano Computer Kit.is a build it yourself computer kit based around the Raspberry Pi. Your mileage may vary as they say.

I probably need to add this Soccer Bot project to my list of robots for teaching programming. Pi Soccer Bot (Full Build Edition)

Build a football-kickin' robot and challenge your friends on the pitch! Customize it to gain an edge on the competition.

Mark Guzdial shared Cynthia Lee's excellent list of what CS teachers can do for inclusive teaching Are you doing these things?

Rule the arena with a Bluetooth controlled BBC micro:bit buggy The Micro:Bit as the heart of maker projects is something I do “get.”

I say some code for a BBC Micro:Bit  Binary clock at http://makeandshape.com/stuff/ I’m thinking there has to be a way using less code but haven’t had the time to try myself. A binary clock for the Micro:Bit has been on my plan list for a while though. Maybe I need to move it up the priority list? This was done in TouchDevelop BTW.