Color changes, movement, and explosions!

When we first started, Hector was having students copy and paste programs from his blog... they got the joy of making their objects "do stuff" but they weren't thinking about the programs very hard. It was also sort of a free-for-all.... RL Hector competing with the computers for the students' attention.

So, the past two weeks, we'ved tried a new tactic. RL Hector comes with pre-printed lessons and sits down the with students AWAY from the computers to explain what they'll be learning.

He's also having the kids type the programs themselves. It's wonderful.. they're getting a sense of how detail-oriented programming is (and we love how, when a program won't save, the compiler tells us where the error is! -- this is SO great for teaching!). Typing out the programs has also helped the kids to start to think about what makes the programs work. They realize that when they forget the "llListen" command, their objects won't listen to their commands. They're learning that if they don't set the "startPosition" their objects don't move properly.

Last week Tiana asked to learn how to make objects come on command. The boys wanted to make things explode. Hector taught them both programs today. He also finally got them to learn how to talk on private channels.

Hector has tried to teach them how to talk on private channels before, but they were not terribly interested. However, once Chestnut realized that he could plant explosives all over and SHOUT "explode" to make them pop all over our parcel, he started shouting a lot. Suddenly Sin started to get frustrated because Chestnut kept exploding Sin's explodable objects WHILE he was trying to script them. Sin quickly learned how to chat on a private channel. It was our first experience of the interactive aspect of SL pushing the kids to better programming.

I've made multi-flavored donuts and I'm trying to teach them to dance.... hopefully I'll have a photo tomorrow to post up here.