Our college has won a major grant for a science and language centre.

The college was awarded close to $2 million in 2009 from the Federal Government towards the construction of a new science and language centre to be completed in 2010.

For a school that has worked long and hard to secure funding, this is both an great addition to our college facilities and exciting development.

Bilingualism can give students great opportunities for future employment and has many other advantages. Our Bilingual program has operated since 1997 when it was an early pilot. Today, students gain subject literacy in two languages - Chinese/English Science and Greek/English Mathematics.

You can read more about this in the local NeosKosmos.COM newspaper.

'Sort Of Dunno Nothin' is a great Australian music clip by Peter Denahy. You can have a chuckle at the language used by the teenager in the clip and our accent. I must check out the other work by Peter.

When I consider the few words sometimes used by some of our students, this is very funny (or scary if you have any teenagers)!

We have installed a suite of different programming tools on all the college computers.

• Alice has some GUI tools to move images around a screen in order to create a 3D story.
• Ren'Py supports the creation of visual novels. 

Alice and Ren'Py both use Python scripting to make things 'work' both come with a built-in tutorial to get the students started. They include some sample activities and an interactive tutorial to get students started.

These seem to be very engaging tools for my middle school students. I have not done an extensive literature review but from what I have read so far, presenting programming in a storytelling context is a great way to engage and motivate girls. Lindy McKeown mentioned something along this line at the 2008 VITTA conference keynote address. Oddly enough, some of the boys related to these games from their use of Adventure Quest, an online flash based game.

Although our ASISTM cluster has been using GameMaker, I have kept an eye out for other game programming options.

Over the January break, one of my students attended a summer school at NSW University. She was really motivated by the use of Python and with her team, built an Internet search engine. Python has had a splendid writeup and great future in our classrooms. To date I have found..

• A Python programming competition on the Internet.
• A physics-based puzzle game written in Python for PyWeek 2. Features over 15 levels, a "free-play" mode and an integrated level editor.
• A research paper that compares eleven programming languages which are currently used in introductory courses. The comparison suggests that Python is one of the most suitable languages to be considered for use in the classroom.
• A game programming exercise and challenge, this chap created a role playing game from scratch in 40 hours using python and a suite of free software.

Those that might find Python a bit too hard, there is always Gambas.

Computers have existed for a number of years without rodent support. You may be surprised where your mouse tail leads if you give it a tug and lift the lid off your computer cover.

Alan is credited to be the inventor of Smalltalk, the first computer system to pioneer a WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers). Smalltalk was developed in the Learning Research Group at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970's. It later became the inspiration and technical basis for the MacIntosh and subsequent windowing based computer operating systems. Bill has weblogged a nice quote collection of futurist quotes by Alan Kay.

Squeak is a modern, highly portable, fast and full-featured implementation of Smalltalk. Squeak is a media authoring tool that can be used by kids to create their own media or share and play with others. Students can use Squeak to learn more about how the world works. It is an excellent game development platform and includes some game source codes to get users started including Chess, Freecell and Mines. In a weblog post by Don Box is an interesting review why he chose this programming language for his kids to learn at home. Squeak is free to download and Open Source.

I am also interested to read on Wikipedia Squeak that Alan Kay and other contributors are using Squeak to working together on the Croquet project that will offer a networked, real time, collaborative workspace with 2D and 3D abilities. Sounds cool heh?

Time for me to start a new pet project by downloading a free copy of Squeak then having a look at the Squeak training introduction and tutorial. (squeak, squeak..)

I just read a report on the ABC news that Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev has just set a record for the most days spent in space. Over his 20 year career, he has managed to clock up almost 748 days in space and many record breaking firsts.

His extensive contributions to space science include Ruglish, "When we are short of words in one language we can use the other".

Here is a good quote by him about humanity;

"The farther you travel, the more you feel kind of part of a big group of people, and traveling outside of Earth. I remember this feeling, being part of mankind. We represent not only our hometown, or even our countries in space. It's more like an international adventure." Sergei Krikalev on the Discovery Channel website