Summer Institute 2014 High School Computers

We are finishing the 2014 Summer Institute Course for High School computers, which constituted working on the curriculum for the Game Design 2: Mobile Applications class. We were also able to look at Web Design, Computer Applications, and Game Design I just a bit.

I found quite a few tools that will work really well for the classes I'll be teaching in the fall. I'll even begin to incorporate some of these elements into my college class this summer.


One website is: http://www.gcflearnfree.org/topics
This website has topics on typing and extra practice for students using any of the Microsoft Office Applications. I have quite a few students in my college classes that come in not knowing how to keyboard. This is essential in today's world. Having extra step-by-step lessons on any of the MS Office applications is also helpful.

Photoshop Tutorials: http://entheosweb.com/photoshop/default.asp
I'm teaching Photoshop in the Fall to the Game Design I high school students, but it is not an in-depth course. These are good tutorials to help with backgrounds or sprites for the students' gaming worlds. It is also helpful for anyone who needs to know how to use some of the functionality of Photoshop, but not the whole suite.

Also see: http://tv.adobe.com/
Once again, these are easy tutorials to go through these less in-depth projects that are needed to create some of the objects for Game Design and Mobile Apps.

Mobile Applications Platforms & Tutorials:
MIT App Inventor: http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/ - MIT's App Inventor is the easiest of the three that we used to create Mobile Apps. It is similar to Scratch in that it has an interactive GUI that makes it easy to

Live Code: http://livecode.com/ - This was one that was a step above the MIT App Inventor, but it isn't all coding either. We are going to introduce this to the students and allow them to use this as an option for their final projects.

Codecademy: http://www.codecademy.com/ - Great tutorials for how to use Python

Learn Python the Hard Way: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book - Good basic tutorials for how to use Python

There's also the resource: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/ for web-based development. This is really great to see what is new or up-and-coming!

Maybe some of these will help you in your own education! Good Luck!