Software
Invent To Learn Quickstart Guides
Other Resources
Turtle Art materials
- Get Turtle Art (main website)
- Browser-based TurtleArt (beta)
- TurtleArt for the iPad
- Gary Stager’s Early Turtle Art activities
- Turtle Art Activity Cards
Micro:bit
- Curated collection of micro:bit resources
- Four Take Home Makerspaces for Under $100
- Programming Neopixels with MakeCode and the BBC micro:bit
- New micro:bit released November 2020. Same price, more features including on board speaker and microphone.
New Handouts, Prompts, and Project-starters by Gary Stager
- Making Polygons in Turtle Art
- Playing with Arithmetic in Turtle Art
- Thinking About Tricky Pattern Blocks in Turtle Art
- Variables and Scale in Turtle Art
- Mr. Nobody in Turtle Art
- Turtle Art Quilt Project Starter
- Getting Started with Lynx
- Lynx Quilt Project Starter
- Experimenting with Language in Lynx
- Graph a Mystery Picture in Lynx
- micro:bit Getting Started Prompts
- micro:bit Fireworks Challenge
- micro:bit LED Fun
- Additional micro:bit Challenges
- Flip Your Friend’s Coin with micro:bits
- Graphing Linear Equations in Snap!
- The 3N problem – Explanation and online virtual assistant.
- Download the complete Gary Stager 2018 Math Workshop handout packet
Free classic Turtle Geometry e-Books
Barry Newell’s books, Turtle Confusion and Turtle Speaks Mathematics
Essential Reading for Institute Participants
- Twenty Things to Do with a Computer by Cynthia Solomon and Seymour Papert
- Computer as Material: Messing About with Time by Seymour Papert and George Franz
- Logo History
- What’s the Big Idea? Toward a Pedagogy of Idea Power by Seymour Papert
- What is Logo? And Who Needs It? By Seymour Papert
- Constructing Modern Knowledge – Uncompromising Constructionism for Teacher Development (This article describes the method behind our institute approach.)
- Invention Literacy by Jay Silver
Invent To Learn Web Sites
The Daily Papert (archives of Papert writing and media)
The Invent To Learn website (oodles of resources)
Constructing Modern Knowledge Press (publisher of books by creative educators for creative educators)
Gary Stager’s blog, Stager-to-Go
Constance Kamii Math Resources
Constance Kamii math videos (multiple videos)
Constance Kamii Direct vs Indirect Ways of Teaching Number Concepts at Ages 4-6
A comprehensive lecture explaining Piagetian ideas showing that although number concepts cannot be taught directly, they can be taught indirectly by encouraging children to think.
Kamii Games for Developing Number Sense
- Arithmetic Games with Playing Cards
- Modifying a Board Game (Sorry) to Foster Kindergartners’ Logico-Mathematical Thinking
- Lining-Up the 5s – A Card Game
- Kamii Game Cards to download and print
- Kamii on Games over Worksheets (article)
- An important paper by Constance Kamii – Selected Standards from the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, Grades K-3: My Reasons for Not Supporting Them
Logo activities
These activities designed for MicroWorlds EX should be applicable to other programming environments, like Turtle Art, Scratch, Snap!, and especially Lynx. If you translate any of these activities for other languages, please let me know!
- Old-fashioned Quilt Making in an Online Collaborative Setting – Use MicroWorlds EX in this simple open-ended creativity project. (2007)
- Making Aboriginal Dreamtime Designs with MicroWorlds – An interdisciplinary project (2000)
- Gary’s Fraction Software Activity
- 21st Century Logo Quilts – A Twist on a Classic Geometry/Art Activity (1999)
- Build Your Own Virtual Pet with MicroWorlds
Make Your Own Tamagotchi ©1998-99 Adam Smith with a bit of help from Gary Stager - Turning Math Manipulatives Inside Out (1998)
- MicroWorlds Claymation – Create your own Wallace and Gromit with one line of code! (2000)
Software Manuals & reference materials
Lynx
- Getting Started with Lynx
- Lynx project guides, activity cards, teacher resources
- List of Lynx Primitives (reference manual)
Snap!
- Snap! Reference Manual
- Learning Modules for Beginners by SAP Young Thinkers
- Computer Science with Snap!, by Eckart Modrow
Snap! MOOCS and Online Courses
- Get Coding with Snap! at openSAP
- From Media Computation to Data Science at openSAP
- The Beauty and Joy of Computing
- Introduction to Computer Science at TEALS
Wolfram Resources
Resources related to Conrad and Stephen Wolfram’s work on math, computation, and programming
Articles about Teaching Programming
- What’s Your Hurry?
- A Modest Proposal (using Scratch books as reading texts)
- Masterclass archived video – Gary Stager’s approach to teaching programming
- Video – Summer Camp Computing or, Nostalgia for the Future
Books and magazines for programming project ideas
- Recommended resources for many programming languages and books on the Invent to Learn site.
- Hello World – A magazine for teachers and kids about making and computing. Free to download, also free by mail to UK educators.
- HackSpace Magazine – Although published in partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, this magazine offers open source projects for a wide variety of physical computing and fabrication projects. All issues can be downloaded for free.
Basic Computer Games books (pdf form) – great ideas for beginner programming projects.
- Basic Computer Games (first edition 1973)
- More Basic Computer Games (1980)
Programming Slides
