Tag: Joe

Bill’s Grandpa

Billsgrandpa1

“Bill always carried a picture of his grandfather in his suit jacket. That suit was the only thing he inherited from him. Bill’s grandpa spent most of his life living in rockpiles and stone walls. He tried to live under other people’s beds when he was younger, but he scratched up too many floorboards.”

 

This is the rather excellent work of Travis Louie you can see more here

Scratch

I finally decided to start teaching Annabel some very basic programming the other day, with the anniversary of the BBC Micro upon us I started to feel all nostalgic about how much I used to enjoy getting a computer to do something rather than just playing games! We spent some time with Chipmunk Basic, which although a very good implementation on the MAC or PC (and it’s free!) didn’t really capture Annabel’s imagination for too long (after we got it to say poo in a variety of different voices). Anyway after trawling around for a while I stumbled across the Scratch project which is created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Essentially Scratch is a graphics-based programming language which is totally drag, drop and click but enables you to create animations or even simple games very quickly and the best bit is you can share the results with the rest of the world on the Scratch website. You can download Scratch from the web here (yes it’s free too) as well as play on the some of the games that have been created by other Scratch users. The video below should give you some ideas on just what you can do with Scratch;