Moonhack 2018: A new world record for kids coding! By Angela Brown for AACE Review On 20th July 2018, kids all over the world participated in Moonhack, a space-themed event to get kids coding. When I first wrote about Moonhack 2018 it was a month before launch and the anticipation was building like … Read more
Prepare for fun! Scratch 3.0 is coming By Angela Brown for AACE Review Popular and free, the block-based code platform Scratch was originally launched in 2007, by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT Media Lab. Scratch rapidly grew an online community on its platform for games, animations and storytelling, primarily aimed … Read more
Book Review: Calling all Minds: How to Think and Create Like an Inventor By Angela Brown for AACE Review Are you a visual thinker? If you are, how do you know this? What is the experience of thinking visually? Temple Grandin’s book, Calling All Minds: How to Think and Create Like an Inventor, opens with a … Read more
Moonhack is back! Participate, Observe, Learn, Code By Angela Brown for AACE Review On 20th July 2018, defy earthbound gravity and lift your imagine off into the farthest reaches of space in a playful way to get kids coding. What is #moonhack? First launched in 2016 by Code Club Australia, Moonhack … Read more
Book Review: Gabi’s If/Then Garden by Caroline Karanja By Angela Brown for AACE Review It’s refreshing to see a book about coding that embeds computational thinking into the natural world of gardens and growing food. Particularly for younger children, understanding coding as a powerful thinking tool for problem-solving, paired with an emerging … Read more
Learners Making Science By Angela Brown for AACE Review The 2017 Innovating Pedagogy Report from The Open University (OU) has identified Learners Making Science as one of ten “innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education.” The report identifies … Read more
After-school Code Club – Lifelong Kindergarten? By Angela Brown for AACE Review After my first term volunteering to start an after-school Code Club in a public library, one of the challenges we’ve been grappling with is how to keep activities roughly on task and progressing coding skills, without being at … Read more
The faces of School Library Makerspaces: Teacher Librarians Jackie Child and Megan Daley By Angela Brown for AACE Review Surrounded by content resources, library spaces can be easily imagined as content creation spaces. School Libraries in particular, can be seen to have an almost ‘goldilocks’ environment, just right for a Makerspace. From outside, it may seem almost … Read more
Book Review: Girls who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World by Reshma Saujani By Angela Brown for AACE Review Reshma Saujani’s book Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World conjures up conflicting emotions for me, before I even turn a page. Part of me wishes this book didn’t need to exist and that there … Read more
Book Review: Coding as a Playground: Programming and Computational Thinking in the Early Childhood Classroom By Angela Brown for AACE Review Through my explorations of Makerspaces, I keep returning to wonder about why we create separate, distinct spaces aside from others “for making”. In a similar way, we also create designated play spaces, like playgrounds “to play”. These boundaries … Read more