Hour of Code @ PHA
Another year, another Hour of Code for the Parke House Academy! We presented to ~40 students and 6 teachers this year, and guided them through the new Dance Party activity. Happy CSEdWeek!
First Place @ I/ITSEC 2019
Congratulations are in order for Bishop Moore High School students, Marcus Lisman, Patrick Snider, and Liam Sy, who won first place at the Future Leaders Pavilion at I/ITSEC this year! Congratulations also to Sharon Dearman, their computer science teacher, and UCF SMST Ph.D. student, John Sermarini, for mentoring the students. The students developed and demoed…
Block-Code-Block IntelliJ Plugin
We released Amphibian, a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA that converts Java code to blocks and vice versa. The initial codebase was branched from the Droplet Editor (used by Pencil Code, Code.org, etc.) that we modified to support various additional languages. Blanchard, J., Gardner-McCune, C., & Anthony, L. (2019, October). Amphibian: Dual-Modality Representation in Integrated Development…
Student Perceptions of Code Representation
Presenting at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) 2019 Text languages are perceived by many computer science students as difficult, intimidating, and/or tedious in nature. Conversely, blocks-based environments are perceived as approachable, but many students see them as inauthentic. Bidirectional hybrid environments provide textual and blocks-based representations of the same code,…
UCF Camp Connect
We had the pleasure of working w/ UCF Camp Connect this summer. Every year UCF hosts various STEM related camps, workshops, and activities for K-12 students. From their website: “Camp Connect is a week-long day camp that introduces students to a variety of engineering disciplines such as Electrical, Computer, Industrial, Mechanical, Aerospace, Civil, Environmental, Construction,…
STEM Night @ OSS
Last night we participated in Orlando Science School Elementary‘s “Family Technology Night.” This time we brought along an IR sensing teddy bear. The kids (and parents) really enjoyed seeing how cool/hot they were – and learning about different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. We presented the following exhibits: IR camera connected to Raspberry Pi 3…
Ginger Leigh @ OSS
Local digital artist and musician, Ginger Leigh, spoke with the Girls in Coding Club (GCC) at Orlando Science School Elementary today. She presented some of her projects that she did for the Orlando Science Center, and presented an instrument with minimal coding in Processing.
Sim Support for Bishop Moore
Thank you to Full Sail University student and Cacti Council volunteer Patrick O’Connor for speaking with Bishop Moore High School programming students today. Patrick demoed previous projects and answered questions. Patrick O’Connor and Aroosh Bhakhri have agreed to mentor students Kathy Kong and Kris Buno with their VR CPR simulator, which they plan to demo…
Liam’s Pixel Man
Parke House Academy 3rd-grade student Liam Kimes used our Kano Pixel Kit to create a pixel man, as well as complete the exercises that come with their software. He was able to easily apply the MIT Scratch block code format learned at school to the Kano software, and he liked that he was able to…
Girls Coding Club @ OSS
We had the honor of working with Ashlynn Christian and her Girls in Coding Club at Orlando Science Schools Elementary for a few months this year. Most of the girls are in 3rd grade, and they used Google’s CS-First to create custom stories and complete specific challenges. The learned about input, events, loops, and moving…