We’ve designed the event to be open to all. So, if you’re free, and in the area, come along!

One of the more exciting things will be a look at what Scratch 2.0 can do. If you’ve not seen the preview video yet, it is well worth a look.

Now, back to preparing resources for the challenge!

The CPC site has a bit of an odd history. It started off as a quick challenge in an A Level class when demonstrating how Overture (remember that?) worked. We found a reasonably popular search term which it was possible to develop a simple site for – by the end of the lesson we has a single page, working site.

That was followed by an ugly site containing a few articles, mainly set up to show how CSS could be used to create a navigation menu.

The next incarnation of the website was provided by my Year 7 students. I like to give a makeover challenge for a real site – so that year, they got the opportunity to put together a new version of the site using a set of customisable templates and tools. For me, the most impressive part of that was the range of great ideas they had for a Scratch splash screen for the homepage…

My big news is that in April 2012, I was invited to attend the Google Teacher Academy in London. I have published my reflections here .

However, I’ve moved on a little. I’ve since concluded that it’s even better if they have the choice to edit – but also have a number of pre-written interactivities to choose from. And one day, I’ll get round to providing something like that on a larger scale…

In the meantime, here’s an example of one of my Scratch re-writes, I plan to have the ICT Specialist site completely re-done before the end of February – then it’s back to seeing what I can do with InteractiveStuff.org.

Learn more about this project

One part of me says, “Don’t bother – no-one visits those pages anyway.” However, it would be nice to re-work the whole of what used to be on the site – rather than just the popular pages.

You can upload your Scratch file to the your account on the Scratch website. Mine is at http://scratch.mit.edu/users/David_Hellam.

However, if you have created several slightly different versions of an interactivity, and you don’t want to clutter your Scratch account with them, you can host them on your own website.

There are two files you need – ScratchApplet.jar and soundbank.gm – full instructions are given in the support forums.

All I did was copy these to a folder on my site and placed my .sb files in the same folder.

Then I just changed two parameters for the applet code snippet for embedding Scratch files, so that the codebase pointed to the directory with my files in it, and the project’s value to the filename for my .sb file.

Here’s an example:

My teacher’s pack from the Google Science Fair arrived by FedEx this morning. Inside are pre-printed letters, posters and some sticker-like things that intrigue me. More details will be available from Google’s website on Jan 11. My guess is that it will be similar to ThinkQuest or Doors To Diplomacy – but will encourage students to participate in original research/experimentation and document their results. Depending on the categories for entry whether there’s an emphasis on practical experimentation, I may have some students who would be keen to participate.

So, I’m going to refine this and see if I can come up with a Unit that other teachers can play with.

It’s a simple enough idea – giving an existing site a make-over. Last year, I took my Mathematical Interactivities site and discussed making a new homepage – provided them with screenshots and text, and ended up with some good quality introductory work – this year, I think we’ll do a whole site. I’m going to re-work ICTspecialist.com with my Year 8 students. As an introductory exercise, I’m thinking that my ComputerPogrammingClass.com website needs a complete overhaul into a Scratch Arcade and tutorials website – that will be the Year 7 project.

Over the weeks, I’ll post different examples of what I’ve done with my students and evaluate the effectiveness of each part.

The software I’ll be using is KomPoZer = it’s free, if you’ve not taken a look at it, I’d recommend you give it a whirl.