Tuesday, March 31st at 12:00pm Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Main 310 N. Tryon St We will join the MakerSpace guys at Idea Box at noon tomorrow (12 and up only). We will be on hand to learn and share. Our twelve year old will be in … [Read more...]
Stream YouTube To Roku With Your Phone
We use YouTube channels in our homeschool. Check out five of our favorite channels for science and math. Since that post we have watched many videos on physics, astronomy, and chemistry. Recently we discovered that we can use the YouTube app on our phone … [Read more...]
Are You An Agile Family?
About a month ago David came home from work, turned on the TV and asked me to come into the room. I heard the familiar woosh of a TED Talks video and sat with him in The Big Green Chair. A co-worker told him he should watch this video about using Agile in … [Read more...]
Learn to Program Artillery! V
For our last installment of Artillery, we will be adding a second player, formatting the angle and velocity inputs and keeping score of our hits. To start, lets reformat the input area of our webpage so that the text boxes line up. To do this we will … [Read more...]
What Can You Learn From Playing Lightbot?
If you haven't figured it out yet from previous posts, I am a programmer by trade. As such I have a keen interest in others learning to code at one level or another. Lightbot teaches some of the fundamental thought processes that programmers use on a … [Read more...]
Learn to Program Artillery! IV
For this installment of Artillery, we will add a cannon and a target and randomize the locations in which they are rendered. We will also randomize the mountain and give it a slightly smoother look. Let’s start by adding the cannon and target images … [Read more...]
Learn to Program Artillery! III
For this installment of Artillery, we will add collision detection and an image indicating where the projectile impacted. Collision detection is simply measuring where our projectile lands and determining if some other object, like the ground or a … [Read more...]
Learn to Program Artillery! II
In our last post Learn to Program Artillery we left off with entering a velocity, an angle and the “Fire” button. The code would draw an arc on the screen based on these parameters. This time we will add a mountain to shoot over (or through until we do … [Read more...]
Learn to Program Artillery!
I want to teach my 16 year old son how to program. When I asked him what he would like to try to do he said, “I would like to make a game.” We settled on the game Artillery! in which you shoot over an obstacle and try to hit your opponent before they … [Read more...]
Resources For Teaching Your Middle Schooler How To Program
This post is a part of the series How To Be a Coder. You can read other posts in this series: How To Be a Coder and Teach Your Toddler to Program. Beginning around the age of eleven our oldest boys started expressing a desire to learn to program. … [Read more...]