I’ve been a little quieter than usual for a number of reasons, one of which is that I’ve been working on a workshop for the University. It’s aimed at getting 17-18 year olds interested in taking Computer Science, and I’m using Processing for that.
I’m experimenting with what I’m calling an Activity Based Curriculum. I.e. rather than deciding to teach a concept like types, or conditional logic, or loops, I work with an example of something that you might actually want to do, and the concept is a side-effect. As I’m using Processing, it’s completely visual. The workshop is just 3 hours long, so I’m aiming to send the students away with an understanding of why it’s cool to be able to program, rather than with the basics of doing so.
As part of my contract, I specified that the course content be licensed under Creative Commons and the code will be released under GPL.
If you’re interested, you can find it here. As ever – let me know what you think.