Dale Coan Currently a specialist teacher of computing covering all years groups from Y1 to Y6 at Hexthorpe Primary School, Doncaster, South Yorkshire. I have been a specialist teacher of primary computing for 10 years and have also been a schools curriculum ICT technician for 10 years so I have seen both sides of the fence, but can’t say which side of the fence the grass is greener! I have also had other roles outside of education in engineering, software support and development as well as systems and network management/installation etc. so you could say a wide and varied career.”
Driving test using Scratch
Small challenge looking at sensing, but rather than expecting the children to pluck a solution out of the air, I have provided ‘a solution’ in the form of the required blocks to act as a scaffold. Now they have to concentrate on working out how it works together rather than having the added task of working out what blocks they need in the first place. That part is left as an extension for them to provide their own solution.
Playing with Alice! by Dale Coan
Here is my attempt at creating a kind of ‘walk through’ tutorial you could give out. Would require some previous basic experience of using Alice 2.4 but the methods are quite simple and screenshots are provided with each step. I have show how to animate a character and demonstrated how to link that to and event driven scenario i.e. Zombie (everyone likes a zombie game!) walks forward and turns when the relevant arrow keys are pressed, The example Alice world also includes sounds and a puddle that causes the Zombie to growl if he steps in it. This events driven style forms the basis for all games and could be used as a starting point for pupils to think about creating their own game. The hardest point is actually manipulating the characters legs to rotate in the correct way, something Alice leaves a lot to be desired for. Would probably use this with HA Y5/6.
Link for downloading the PDF file of the Alice project : http://ictinpractice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Animation-and-Event-basedprogramming. pdf
Link for downloading Alice 2.4:
http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=downloads/download_alice2.4
