Sunday, August 7, 2011

Possible change of direction

This weekend we went shopping for school supplies for my younger son. He'll be living in a dorm, which means all the usual things. However, the school has also suggested that he start learning some Flash programming so a stop at B&N was in order.

Looking through the books started taking me back to coding again! Even though my older son is also in a programming curriculum, I'm reliving the past a lot more. Maybe it is the game programming part. I ended up spending most of my time today going through some old code I had (old as in the last 3-4 years) and started updating it to work with HTML5 Canvas and my iPad.

As I started taking some of my code and making it into classes and various libraries, well to some extent anyhow, it struck me that maybe I could have the students work on coding. If I could create an initializing js file and merely have the students include it, I wonder if I could come up with something. Or, better yet, look around for someone who has already done it. Something I definitely need to start thinking about more...if not for this year, then for next.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

This year in Tech Ed

I've looked at my Tech Ed notes from last year, the length of time I thought a project would take (and the length it actually took) as well as some that needed to be changed entirely. Also, having most of the students last year, I think I know some of the topics that we're going to be tackling. One in particular has me really excited, and I eluded to it in a prior post.



This year we'll be taking a harder look at programming. The theme of my Technology Education class is already looking at how technology has changed society and how society is changing technology -- we're going to spend more time on Scratch and hopefully work our way into the Android inventor app from Google Labs (I hope to get started before they close it). The idea is to increase logical thinking and have some fun while we do it. If we can get into actual coding, that would be great, but for now I'm just hoping to get started with it.

This should be fun!