Bringing Sense into the classroom
When we (a team of us at the OU who worked on the module My Digital Life ) developed the SenseBoard and adapted MIT's Scratch language as Sense to teach entry level programming, we had to develop activities that students could complete while studying at a distance and therefore not overly complicated (at least at first). In fact the approach we gave was to give students partially completed Sense programs and get them to add the missing elements. The overarching goal was to have students build interesting and above all fun projects right from the beginning. However, the programming guide that was written to introduce all of the basics (iteration, selection, variables, etc) was designed to be studied over a 1 week period and there didn't easily lend itself to delivery in a 1-day face to face workshop. It also didn't make much use of the SenseBoard as an I/O device. Therefore when were approached with the idea of running a workshop together with UCL's Schools Outreac