Meet Brian Crosby

Today I met with Brian Crosby, former teacher who is now the technology coordinator for the Washoe County School District. What an awesome guy! I had no idea who he was. He was on TED two times: http://learningismessy.com/blog/ Watch the two videos shown on the right. He was totally impressed with NCLab. Understood the main

DCSD to Adopt Karel

Today we visited the beautiful city of Minden and met with Dr. Lisa Noonan, the superintendent of Douglas County School District (DCSD). Her school district has over 6,000 students. Dr. Noonan is an impressive administrator – she actually solved the 20 exercises of the Hour of Code tutorial. If I can do it, you can

EduLock and NCLab

Las Vegas, NV – After the “hour of code” movement announced recently, two companies from Reno are combining forces to inspire children to learn and enjoy computer coding. Under an initial arrangement EduLock and NCLab will make their combined platforms available to the children from a slum in India. During EduLock’s development in India, they

10-Year-Old CAD Experts

The NCLab Winter Camp on Robotics and 3D Modeling at the Discovery Museum in Reno lasted one week and kids were exposed to many different activities. They learned about various types of robots and where they are used, ethical and philosophical issues, designed robots on paper, and built 3D models from paper, wood, and plastic.

ESCO 2014 – Deadline Extended

Based on a growing number of participants, the organizing committee of ESCO 2014 decided to expand the conference by adding one more parallel session. With more capacity available, we are pleased to announce that also the abstract submission deadline was extended until 31 January 2014. ESCO 2014 (the 4th European Seminar on Computing) will take

Go Fire Karel!

The NCLab Winter Camp in computer programming at the Nevada Discovery Museum (NVDM) in Reno just finished and it was awesome! In addition to building mazes on computer screen and programming Karel the Robot to navigate them, the kids also built mazes for themselves using cardboard, and navigated them using the same algorithms! Of course,

Karel vs. Scratch

Let’s compare Karel the Robot and Scratch by solving the same maze. The Karel version is on the left, Scratch on the right: In Karel, students type the following code: To solve the maze with Scratch, students do not type code. Instead, they assemble the following graphical block with the mouse: Scratch also provides a

3D Rainbow

Here is a neat rainbow model that we created with kids during the NCLab Winter Camp at the Discovery Museum in Reno. The rainbow is created using concentric thin rings, removing their halves by subtracting a suitably positioned large cube, and displaying them together. This is also a very good exercise to practice Python lists.

CAD Model on a Smartphone

Today I received this link with a Sierpinski tetrahedron fractal from Dr. Teague https://desktop.nclab.com/viewer/6a830b8f27b44d76a4eccaad06aac400 while working with kids at the Discovery Museum in Reno. Since I did not have time to sit down with a computer, I just opened the link on my Android smartphone – and it worked! For a complex 3D geometry, pretty

Battleship Stairwell

Here is a battleship stairwell created by Dr Teague as part of the NCLab Edmodo 3D modeling course Click on the image below to retrieve the actual 3D geometry from NCLab (this will create a new tab). Use mouse controls to freely rotate the object in 3D space, and zoom in and out. Soon, these