Wisconsin Science Festival -- Programming for Science, Games, and Art

Saturday, September 29th from 1-5pm in CS&S 1370

We use computers all the time. We use them to solve problems, entertain ourselves, and even create art! Have you ever wondered how to program -- that is, how to tell the computer what to do? In our drop-in session, we will guide you through some projects using Scratch, a drag-and-drop programming language from MIT. We will have guides for doing three projects:

Science/Math: Computers are known for being good at solving math problems quickly, which makes them valuable to scientists! In this tutorial, we will investigate the Fibonacci sequence.
Art: We can easily make animations in Scratch. Learn how to make a short movie.
Games: You can use Scratch to make arcade games or guessing games. Maybe you will make the next Angry Birds?

If the lab is not crowded, we will also invite participants to explore Scratch and see what ideas they can come up with. In any case, you can download Scratch and continue to use it at home after the session.