LOGO, Turtles and Mishmash

 Many moons ago (like, 1988) I learned about LOGO. I never used it myself, but always liked the idea. It's the programming language that was originally designed for a plotter output, not a screen display, to introduce kids to programming. It turns out that Purplemash has it! And as I was browsing another area of Purplemash today, I found another slightly fancier flavour there, too. I'll stick to the basics: just Logo. Because it can already be a handful - especially to convey its message to the little ones yourself. Get the turtle to draw a square and you'll be delighted. Don't diggress and load StarLogo or its descendants for a multithreaded parallel turtle environment, please. So, let's go with the basic version first, to draw a square! All required are a couple commands. I'll list more commands in the end and make come comments for the ones willing to try out.

SMALL LIST OF COMMANDS
BRIEF HOW TO DRIVE THE INTERFACE
BIGGER LIST OF COMMANDS

Next time: the other Purplemash version and beyond (StarLOGO TNG).

Incidentally, I'll soon start a "LOGO Spotting (Turtle spotting?)" contest (please chase me on that) and I count on your participation - or maybe the kids' participation. All LOGO sites/mentions will be loaded onto a register and we can map out where and how far LOGO reached. Watch this space.

Sand Castle: Friv

I recently learned about a website with lots of games which my little one heard about from his friends in school. It is an aggregator site with very many games called FRIV. I can comment on some pros and cons I found:
+ it is great because it has no advert links.
+ it has many games at several levels.
- there is no educational programme behind it so don't expect that from it.
- it's not curated for violence/ violence reference (lots of shooting games).

All in all, it's peaceful and non-commercial enough for a parent controlled gaming session. I recommend Sand Castle as it has a bit more than hand-eye coordination training with a realistic aiming exercise. Follow the images below to find it in the page (the clickable icon for the game is the one circled red and yellow below).

Fractonio's Pizzeria (pizzas and fractions) - purplemash

Fractonio's Pizzeria is a neat game,  the player needs to serve mixed topping pizzas upon customer requests and avoid a queue building at the shop. It's a game to practise fractions, but not to learn about fractions from scratch. It comes in 3 levels of difficulty and I thought interest on it would wear out quickly but I see it being used quite often by the little ones - I think the time challenge makes it interesting.

Factoroids - Purplemash

Factoroids is a great game. Remember Asteroids? Just that instead of a spaceship versus asteroids it's a calculator versus number blocks. You can shoot at them, but they will only break if the bullet is a factor of the block. Great time pressure cum motor skills cum times table knowledge! It has a couple levels to choose from.

Buckets of Reasoning: NRich

I was looking for maths activities to go beyond mental maths skills and was referred to the Nrich website - a really cool 20-year strong website with really loads of material. Baby steps first, I went to Stage 1 & 2 and then from there Features > Reasoning > Identifying Opportunities (task) > Eggs in A Basket, where you'll find the notes for the delivery of the activity and the actual activity. Below is our (father+son) Sunday afternoon version of the activity (in Portuguese).

Telling the time 2: discovery

Following up from my earlier post on practising reading and telling the time, I enjoyed seeing how this other activity engages the player really well: it's a snap card game for units of time. It has a dealing speed slider to make the game more or less challenging. Just hover the mouse over the button at the centre to wait for the right card and then...snap it with  the space bar. At any time the help icon on the top left will show the instructions. I was amazed with the satisfaction the little ones get when the right card turns up.

Telling the time: discovery

I find learning to tell the time quite challenging on dial clocks and these activities give a good handle on how to do it.  I personally like the one in 'Match the times', reading clocks in quarter-of-hour intervals.

Phonics mash

Notes for parents supporting phonics work - so, where to start from to help? I found this a good video in 'teacher tips' at discovery espresso. It's about different sounds for the same letters, like in regional differences in pronunciation.

Purplemash: pirates+

Looking up the purplemash website upon suggestion from Miss Kirkby I found this very interesting: the island editor and some videos with a ‘pirate’ describing the proposed activities. However, as I was tutoring Liam, I realised he really wanted to use the car games available and that was a good move. I now would suggest going to purplemash > games and playing A-fish-metic and Maths city 1. The first had a nice counting challenge whereas the latter allowed playing with time, distances and velocities by choosing car speeds.

Soon to come: LOGO https://www.purplemash.com/#app/tools/logo

Espresso coordinates

Have a go at these activities to show how to plot points on a grid. There are 3 activities and they are great to tease the kids on how to display information in a graph.

Discovery: 2D shapes

I found this neat corner of discovery espresso while browsing in the English branches: Lesson Routes. And there I found the "2D shapes" video and activities that will entertain and illustrate the kids on this subject.