Make Create Educate

By Meridith Ebbs @iMerinet @MakeCreateEducate Updated - Originally written for Issue 2 of STEMed Magazine https://issuu.com/stemedmagazine/docs/final_stem_ed_magazine_issue_2 Cross-Curricular Teaching Cross curricular teaching is a pedagogy that can be used to address the time poor classroom. Currently many learning areas are taught in a silo’d fashion, using case studies and resources designed specifically for each subject worksheets for English, units designed for History and Geography and text books for Mathematics. With the curriculum being overcrowded if you can overlap key learning areas in your teaching it allows more time to cover additional content. Cross curricular teaching is when you teach English but complete a comprehension on the theory content associated with a Science unit. It is when you teach graphing in maths but use the results of a science investigation as the content rather than using favourite pizza toppings. Use mathematical language when discussing maps in Ge...

Money is conductive... The purpose of this post is to show how to create a money counter using Scratch and a Makey Makey . What does the code look like? Code for creating a money counter. What are the orange blocks? The Orange blocks are variables. When you have a value that you want the computer to store you create a variable. In this program there is one variable for each coin, one for calculating the total "checksum" and one to prompt the user for the answer. What does the stage look like? Students need a way to track how many times they have counted a coin. To do this you can display the variables on the Scratch stage. This gives a visual tally of each coin. The checksum total is hidden by default but can be displayed for 1 second to check the total by pressing the "a" key. When a user presses the "f" key the user is prompted to add the visible coin totals and enter the total it in 0.00 format. Scratchie the cat will announce if th...

This post is for Maths teachers who teach fractals and assumes knowledge of Fractal theory. Fractals and Recursion Recursion is a recurring function that calls or refers to itself. A function is a name given to a series of steps and is used to simplify programming by referring to or "calling" the function. https://guide.pencilcode.net/edit/functions/ For example the code below is to draw a square. The first part defines "square" as a function and tells the program what "square" means and then uses to the word "square" to draw multiple squares of different sizes and colours without the need to write all the code. square = (size) -> for y in [1..4] fd size rt 90 pen red square 80 jump 15, 15 pen firebrick square 50 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal A Fractal is a curve or geometrical figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. They are useful in modell...