Tag: coding

  • Sharing Mastodon Lists

    Sharing Mastodon Lists

    I am a BIG fan of the federated social media platform Mastodon, and this evening I used Claude.ai to generate code in an HTML file which allows me to quickly share my LISTS on Mastodon with others. Unlike Twitter, lists on Mastodon are PRIVATE and not directly sharable with others. I spent some time both…

  • NFC Sticker Automation

    NFC Sticker Automation

    Here’s a geeky tale for you. We have an old Bluetooth stereo in our car that does not support CarPlay, and it irritatingly connects automatically to my iPhone in the mornings before school when I start the vehicle to warm it up. This evening I successfully configured a NFC sticker (37 cents each in a…

  • Packet Defender 1.0

    Packet Defender 1.0

    Today was the first day of our spring semester, and I’m teaching middle school web design again. As part of our introductory class, we watched the video, “The Internet: IP Addresses & DNS” from Code.org and then played a Kahoot I made with AI about it, using the video transcript. As we learn to create…

  • Scratch Coding Resources

    Scratch Coding Resources

    I received an email earlier this year from a teacher in South Africa who is interested in starting a school and including coding in the curriculum. I finally responded to that message (yikes!) asking for links to CODING RESOURCES I use and have shared, including resources for using Scratch coding from MIT. These are the…

  • Visualizing Off-Planet Habitats

    Visualizing Off-Planet Habitats

    My middle school computer programming students are continuing to work on our “Coding Mars” unit, in which they are using Minecraft MakeCode to simulate the 3D printing of structures and habitats which Icon of Austin, Texas, is under contract with NASA to do first on the moon / the lunar surface and (ultimately) on Mars.…

  • Social Media Text Prepper

    Social Media Text Prepper

    It is now possible to use generative AI / artificial intelligence platforms, like ChatGPT 4, to create simple to relatively complex web applications without knowing the precise syntax of programming languages. By formulating detailed prompts for the AI chatbot, it is possible to create code in various languages (including javascript and HTML) which the user…

  • Reflections on PD Hackathon 2023

    Today I’ve had an opportunity to participate, facilitate, and volunteer as a judge in our fall 2023 Hackathon at our school, Providence Day School of Charlotte, North Carolina. This is the second time I’ve been able to be part of the Hackathon, and in this post I’d like to reflect a little about some of…

  • Reflections on Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy (Part 1)

    This week I am attending a 4 1/2 day robotics workshop at Carnegie Mellon University, learning how to teach middle school robotics with the “Lego Spike Prime” robot platform. This is based on the Scratch programming language from MIT, which I love and have been using for over 10 years. In this podcast reflection (from…

  • Podcast460: UCO and OCCC Concurrent Classes, GitHub in CompSci, and Elementary Coding Lessons

    Welcome to episode 460 of Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer, from March 13, 2018. This podcast features a series of three recent interviews, and opens with a recommendation to try the newly updated Anchor.fm website and Anchor mobile app for podcast creation and publishing. The first interview is with high school…

  • Code as Poetry in 4th Grade Scratch Club

    The highlight of my Mondays now is getting to co-facilitate an after-school Scratch Coding Club with my wife. Today one of our fourth graders discovered a wonderful Scratch block that simplified a much more complex set of blocks I’d showed him a few weeks ago, and created a simple shooting cannon / animated cannon. I…