As planned I spent most of the morning helping at registration. And talking to a lot of people as they came in. After lunch the exhibit hall opened and I was in there early. A few highlights:
A virtual reality version of Alice is coming in the fall. I had a demo wearing an Oculus headset riding through an Alice world. Very awesome. Virtual Reality and Alice – Wow!
I signed up for GitHub for educators. GitHub classroom looks like a good way to send starter projects to students. I have a lot of exploring to do but there is online training for teachers so I’ll start there.
I had a demo of CodeSpace from FiriaLabs for teaching Python. They have a robot that looks pretty cool as well. Still not sure robots are my think but their connection to Micro:bit looks pretty nice as well.
Code Jumper is a program developed by Microsoft for blind and visually impaired students. It involves physical devices that are a coding language. Think block languages where the blocks are actual physical blocks The teacher who showed it to me tells me that she has used these devices (not available yet but she is in a pilot) with ADHD students They get very engaged. I can really see this useful in a lot of situations. Availability is some time in the fall. I have no idea of pricing.
The welcome reception was top notch. I ate my fill and have no need to a later dinner. Better still was the opportunity to talk to even more people.
BTW, in my last post I mentioned Google’s new Code With Google program. It’s a good collection of resources for teaching computer science. Check it out at https://edu.google.com/code-with-google/
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