Dot Physics

Scratch and HyperHomeschool

Posted by Rhett Allain on July 31, 2009
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Two things. First, my wife started blogging. The best thing about this is that she can no longer complain about my blogging. Her blog is over at HyperHomeschool.com. Basically, she is keeping up with her homeschooling stuff online. I see great potential here.

I guess this gets to the second thing. I made a little screen cast tutorial on Scratch. I figured this would be good material for her blog. In case you are not familiar with Scratch, it is a graphical programming language developed at MIT. It is very similar to the Lego Mindstorms programming language. You can do tons of stuff with this.

In this tutorial, I show how to manually do multiplication. I was going to do something more physicsy, but I didn’t want to get too complicated.

So, if you like stuff like this – go check out HyperHomeschool.

PS – I think I need a better microphone.

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Comments

  1. #1 Uncle Al
    July 31, 2009

    she is keeping up with her homeschooling stuff online

    Affront to the State. Any child who is not obeisant and refractorily stooopid must be medicated. Into what fungible social socket can a child grow who thinks his life has intrinsic value and meaning? He will be insubordinate as a laborer or soldier. He will not consume and discard on demand. He will not believe. He will be a perpetual burden upon those who rule and those who receive.

    Is that what you want for your child, apostasy? Gammas wear green. “To be a Gamma is to be just right.”

  2. #2 Nick
    July 31, 2009

    The microphone sounds OK – I mean, you can hear everything you’re saying. If you were going to do a regular podcast I would agree that a better microphone is necessary but for the occasional screencast this works.

    However, I might suggest Jing (http://www.jingproject.com/) for your screencast creation. A number of people I know claim that it’s the best free screencast tool there is.

  3. #3 Rhett
    July 31, 2009

    @Nick,

    Thanks! I will check out Jing.

  4. #4 Fran
    July 31, 2009

    four weeks ago I made this on scratch:

    http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/WCEastFZX/591811

    It is pretty simplistic, but I was doing it to try out in case it would be worthwhile having my physics 1 students try this out this year. I am still undecided as to whether I want to request that the school district load scratch onto the science dept. laptops. As of now, trying to view my own project at the URL above freezes firefox on my mac, so that makes me less enthusiastic, but that is probably not the scratch people’s fault.