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Today I visited Virginia City Middle School who just started teaching programming courses with Karel the Robot in NCLab. For those who are not experts on the Wild West, Virginia City used to belong to the richest and most famous cities in the U.S. Silver from its mines was used to build San Francisco. The

NCLab will be presented this Sunday afternoon at the annual Darwin Day of Science organized by the Reno Skeptical Society. The event is free and open to the public, please stop by if interested to learning more about NCLab!

I believe that teaching gets close to perfection when students forget that they are actually learning. Today we are supposed to learn the Python for loop and Python lists. But let’s forget about that, and go build a teepee instead! The following program creates a pole, tilts it, moves it away from center, and then

Cottonwood ES in Fernley, NV decided to teach introductory computer programming with NCLab. I visited to facilitate their first class. At the entrance, I was impressed by an airport-like terminal with touch screen in place of the good old signup sheet. Enter your name, print your boarding pass, go. The first group of kids to

Today we filed a patent application for an algorithm to automatically assess the correctness of 3D CAD designs. This algorithm is an essential component of our self-paced interactive course Geometry, 3D Modeling, and CAD Design. What is the algorithm about? You are certainly familiar with online quizzes where the user answers a multiple-choice question and

Last night we deployed a new edition of the Karel course with significant improvements. Your students now have on-demand access to hints throughout the course, which much better reflects the needs of 21st century learners. You can UNLOCK LEVELS for your students so they do not have to redo work they already did. We already figured

NCLab was part of the First Lego League competition finals at UNR. This was the right audience for NCLab’s self-paced computer programming and 3D modeling courses. Awesome experience!

The Cardan Grille, invented around 1550, belongs to the oldest encryption techniques. “In 1550, Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), known in French as Jérôme Cardan, proposed a simple grid for writing hidden messages. He intended to cloak his messages inside an ordinary letter so that the whole would not appear to be a cipher at all. Cardinal

Thanks to an awesome teacher Michele Baumann and a forward-thinking principal Keith Lewis, the Pau-Wa-Lu Middle School in Gardnerville, NV decided to introduce a regular computer programming course with Karel the Robot in NCLab. The course takes 4-5 weeks, with 45 minutes per day. It is self-paced, so that students of all skill levels and