Mike Badger

(SYS-CON Media) - Whether you're a company of one or 100, managing knowledge is a core concern and implementing a knowledge base is a sensible way to capture your content. Dokuwiki is a practical open source Web application for creating a knowledge base that's easy for novice Webmasters to set up but flexible and full-featured. The Dokuwiki Web site (www.splitbrain.org/projects/dokuwiki) describes the Dokuwiki as "a simple to use wiki aimed at a small company's documentation needs. It works on plain text files and thus needs no database. It has a simple but powerful syntax which makes sure the data files remain readable outside the wiki." Dokuwiki runs on a variety of Web servers, including Apache and IIS and requires PHP 4.3.x or higher. If you do not have your own Web server, you can install Dokuwiki on a hosted Web site, as long the Web host includes PHP access. ... (more)

Games of Fortune

In Scratch it's easy to create projects that incorporate dynamic information using variables. However, variables have a limitation; they store only one value at a time. Sometimes, we want a variable to store multiple values. Welcome to lists. In Scratch, a list allows us to associate one list (a variable) with multiple items or values in much the same way we create a list before going to the grocery store. In this Scratch tutorial we will take a trip to the fortune-teller to demonstrate lists, and you'll learn how to: Store and retrieve information in lists Add and remove items fro... (more)

Scratch Assignments

Hélène Martin posts several Scratch assignments that she created for her high school computer science class. According to Hélène: Scratch lends itself very well to ad-hoc experimentation and open ended projects.  When the goal in using it is to teach programming concepts, though, I feel structured assignments are necessary.  Her assingments cover nest loops, spatial reasoning, variables, lists, patterns, random numbers, and good old fashioned thought. ... (more)

Scratch 1.4 Now Available

The Scratch Team announced Scratch 1.4 today. From the release notes:  We are happy to announce the release of Scratch 1.4.  With this new version, you can ask users to input text from the keyboard, snap photos directly from built-in or USB webcams, and control robotics with LEGO® WeDoTM. This version has a more flexible user interface, so that it can work on smaller screens (including netbook computers). I've been using the release candidate for the past month and the interface improvements from Scratch 1.3.1 are reason enough to upgrade. The additional functionality is nice to... (more)

Why Scratch: Learn to Program

Sample Scratch script. This post is kicking off a series of five posts that provide some practical reasons why you could learn Scratch, so you can then use it as a teaching  tool. One of the most obvious uses for Scratch is as a first programming language, whether you are a teacher or a student. If you're eight, eighteen or eighty-eight, you can learn to program with Scratch. It's drag and drop blocks are fast and friendly. You'll be nesting loops and knee deep in Boolean operators before you know hit you.  It's a safe environment to learn. The blocks only fit together one way. N... (more)