August 6th, 2010

Protected: SuperQuest Survey & Stuff

Posted by admin in Education

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August 5th, 2010

Protected: SuperQuest 1-column Layout Code

Posted by admin in CSS, Education, Web Design, XHTML

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August 5th, 2010

Protected: SuperQuest CSS Unit Review Powerpoint

Posted by admin in CSS, Education, Web Design

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August 4th, 2010

Website Layouts Made Simple Starter Code

Posted by admin in CSS, Education, Web Design, XHTML

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I’m in the heart of open source country: Corvallis, Oregon, preparing to teach a workshop on website layout design for the 2010 SuperQuest Summer Institute at Oregon State University. I’ll be covering a variety of CSS techniques to generate cross-browser layouts (1, 2, & 3-column). We’ll also cover typography, use of color, background graphic positioning, and other fun techniques.

So we can get right to the meat of the matter, I decided to post some “starter” code.

XHTML 1.0 Strict Template

 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<style type="text/css">
</style>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

HTML-Ipsum

Since our concern will be primarily with coding layouts, I want to jump right to some sample code to drop into our various columns, headers, & footers. A great site to drop sample code is the HTML-Ipsum site. Look at the page, decide how much or what type of sample code you want, click the title box above the code, and you’ll get the sample code copied to your clipboard, ét voilá!

Stay tuned for some more yummy CSS goodness forthwith…!

July 30th, 2010

Alice & Storytelling Alice Thoughts & Resources

Posted by admin in Education, Object-Oriented Programming, Programming

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I had a lot of fun working with Storytelling Alice for my Programming for Beginners class. In fact, I think I would like to do a workshop entirely on working with Alice (or Storytelling Alice) next time.

What is Alice?

Alice (& Storytelling Alice for that matter) allows you to create and program 3D worlds. It was developed at Carnegie Mellon University under the direction/leadership of Randy Pausch (NOTE: you absolutely must watch Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams or read The Last Lecture if you haven’t before–I dare you to watch or read it all the way through without shedding a tear).

With Alice…

  • You can program animations
  • You can program 3D games
  • You can program simulations
  • With your imagination, I’m sure you can do other things I did not think of
  • And Most Importantly, while you’re programming games and animations, you’ll be learning to program the following…

    • variables (local & global)
    • conditional execution
    • repetition (while loops & for loops)
    • math
    • event-driven programming
    • object-oriented programming (methods, properties)
    • and you might not even realize it

There are currently 3 Main Versions/Flavors of Alice:

  1. Alice 2.2 (or Alice 2.0) – Good for high school and college
  2. Storytelling Alice - Good for middle school or high school (really, in my opinion)
  3. Alice 3 (Beta) - You need Java for this, for this reason, it’s better used at the college level. Note the beta; it’s still buggy from my understanding. Highlights are that EA has entered into a partnership with Alice and have provided the Sims characters as 3D models in Alice 3.

Alice or Storytelling Alice?

Some may ask which program is the better program to use. I am no expert on the differences between the two, but from my experience, I have noted the following:

  • All versions of Alice are free (yay!)
  • Storytelling Alice is based on Alice
  • Storytelling Alice works the same way as standard Alice
    • Anything you can do in Alice, you can do in Storytelling Alice (and vice versa)
    • Worlds created with Storytelling Alice will NOT work with regular Alice (not compatible)
  • Storytelling Alice has more methods built into each object – This is very important to note as some students can get frustrated getting over the learning curve of programming objects
    • For example, the horse in Storytelling Alice has the following Methods ready to go (out of the box):
      • shake head
      • charge forward
      • run (distance)
      • rear
      • paw ground
      • walk (distance, speed)
    • In standard Alice, if you want to program a horse walking, you would have to create your own method and individually program each leg (top & bottom parts) to move, and you would have to figure out how to make it look realistic
    • Another example is the “lunch lady” can perform mind control on other characters (you’ll have to download it and try it out yoursel)
  • Storytelling Alice has worlds & objects designed to encourage story-telling - this is probably due to the additional methods

July 29th, 2010

Learning Python

Posted by admin in Education, Programming, Python

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I’m currently teaching a Programming for Beginners, and I thought my students might appreciate some resources for learning Python. Here they are in no particular order:

  • Hello World: Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners – one of my students showed me this book. I think this might be my new “textbook” for beginning programming. They have some good PyGame samples, and most chapters cover programming games. They even have a 3D chapter using VPython (Visual Python)
  • One Day of IDLE Toying – If you’ve never worked with IDLE before, you should really start here.
  • Instant Hacking – this is a very short, but jam-packed, introduction to both programming and Python.
  • Young Programmers Podcast – if you would rather learn through video podcasts, this is the place for you. This also contains PyGame tutorials. Note: some indicate Jython, which works with Java (not a bad combination, since it allows you to work with Java classes), but I’m guessing you need the Java SDK for this.
  • Learning to Program – this covers a large amount of Python, but I haven’t had much of a chance to explore it. A nice feature of this site is that it has two different versions: one for version 2 and one for version 3
  • A Byte of Python – If you already know how to install Python and get a new file created, I recommend you jump right to chapter 4 (the Basics) or beyond.
  • How to Think Like a Computer Scientist – this was the site that I initially learned Python with. It’s a bit high-end for younger learners, especially the writing, which almost reads like a college textbook

Downloads

  • Download Portable Python 2.6 – the advantage with Portable Python is that you can install it and run it off a flash drive AND comes with PyGame
  • Download Python 3.1.2 Windows Installer – just know that with Python version 3, print is a function print(“Hola, el Mundo!”), and there is no raw_input(), it’s just input() and it treats data as a string, so you’ll need to cast your number strings into floats or integers.

July 12th, 2010

Protected: SA: Web Site Design I Resources

Posted by admin in CSS, Education, Web Design, XHTML

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May 4th, 2010

Teacher Appreciation Week

Posted by admin in Education, Teaching Practices

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In light of teacher appreciation week, I would like to give a shout out to all my favorite teachers:

  • Mrs. Kuhlman, the best Kindergarten teacher ever. Okay sure, she was my only Kindergarten teacher, but the mere fact that I still remember her name, carpet time, and snack time (I can taste the graham crackers as I write this) shows how much of an influence she had on me
  • Ms. Hoff, my 3rd grade teacher who welcomed us to a new school (they converted our elementary school to a middle school)
  • Mr. Harris who always grew his beard out and recited the Gettysburg address
  • Mr. McChesney who made science so much fun with his Van de Graaff Generator
  • Mrs. Najarian who was as tough as nails but taught me English like no other
  • Mrs. Sears who introduced me to video production
  • Ms. McKinney-Wain, my English and Creative Writing teacher who humored my fictional oddities
  • Mr. Curtis, my Physics and Astronomy teacher, whose sneeze could blow your hat off. His physics tests were so rigorous, we were happy to get 60/100
  • Mr. Camwell, the funniest teacher I ever had. He gave us such tough tests that college was a breeze after his preparation
  • Mrs. Fangman my biology and anatomy and physiology teacher who loved her subject so much, we all loved it too
  • Professor Archer, my Core 150 professor who encouraged me to take his Jan. term class at Whitworth where I read a minimum of 100 pages a day (turning me into an English major)
  • Professor Oakland, whose primary assignment on the French study tour was to find a cafe for me to call my own and invite him to a cappuccino
  • Mr. Kilburg who accepted me into the MAT program at George Fox and made every “lecture” (they felt more like workshops) a fascinating sort of recursive experience where I wasn’t sure whether I should pay more attention to how he was teaching or pay more attention to what he was teaching
  • My uncle, Larry, a band teacher whom I never had but was always proud to have as an uncle
  • My mom, a former pre-school teacher who passed on the teaching legacy to me

December 19th, 2009

Best Web Design Tool Ever

Posted by admin in CSS, Education, Teaching Technology, Web Design, XHTML

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No web designer or web design class is complete without Notepad++ (my favorite tool for working on web pages). Download it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/files/

FEATURES:

  • It’s free
  • It can be loaded and run directly onto a flash drive (out of the box)
  • It has color coding for your pages and supports color coding for a huge number of languages (ASP, PHP, Python, & much more)
  • It allows you to open multiple windows for viewing multiple pages (Right-click and choose ‘move to another view’)
  • It has FTP built right in. If you want to upload your pages to a host, and you have all the settings for FTP, you can set up a connection and work directly on the host site or work on your local folders and click the upload button.
  • There’s a launch feature, it should be set up to launch pages in browser (Includes Firefox & IE out of the box)
  • And, for all the hello kitty fans out there, they even have a hello kitty theme where all your code looks like the hello kitty folks styled it (little known fact there).

Warning: setting Notepad++ theme to “Hello Kitty” may cause seizures.

July 2nd, 2009

SuperQuest Flash Files

Posted by admin in Education, Flash, Teaching Practices, Teaching Technology, Uncategorized, Web Design

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Before I post all the files, I want to thank all who attended my workshop. We gathered quite the range of experience. I had so much fun, and I appreciated the input you gave. I hope you take more SuperQuest courses in the future.

Here you go folks!

Flash Files

These are the source files (.fla), shockwave movies (.swf), web pages (.html), & necessary JavaScript (.js) to both edit and post animations. They are all zipped, so you will need to save them (right-click > Save Target As…) and then extract the zipped files.

PowerPoints