Building Computational Thinking Skills

Bing Bee Report
Xolile Madinda
October 2010

I have been observing children at the Bing Bee from about March 2010 till now. I do not say that my observations are completely accurate they are just general.
Overall I found three things about the Bing Bee -
- The children teach themselves and each other how to play. This is already known.

Attached is a paper I gave at IST-Africa 2010.

Local hip hop artist X-Nasty of DefBoyz fame (real name Xolile, or X) has been working with BingBee since January.
There are some really exciting things happening. Read about X, or check out this
great story in our local Grocott's newspaper.

See our new gallery node of activities involving X.

We have downloaded the "Wikipedia for Schools" resource - an encyclopedia which is an extract of the full Wikipedia, with content especially chosen and made suitable for schools.

You can take a full copy of this useful educational resource and install it at home for your children, or at your local school. Please help spread the word!

To access the Wikipedia for Schools online site (for a preview, and a taste of what it is all about), go to http://schools-wikipedia.org/.

We did a content refresh in September. For entertainment, the Singing Hippo and the bouncing ball to teach the words of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika were instant hits. One of the more interesting new activities is a program that gets one running through mazes. The idea was taken from a similar activity in the One Laptop Per Child project (http://laptop.org/en/), and rewriiten and enhanced a bit with automatic level advancement, scoring, multiple targets to eat in the maze, and so on.

If you are a Grahamstownian this probably sounds a lot like the name of a local music group, but no ...

Carol Johnson at the CSD organized some paint for the energetic students in Chris Hani residence. This should slow down the pesky rust, and certainly brightened the Raglan Road site - thanks to all who contributed.

The long-awaited library opened its doors among much fanfare last week. The library is on the same site as BingBee, with front doors about 20 metres apart! There is nice bench-space around the walls, and decent working tables in the library, so the situation cries out for some collaborative activity that lets us make use of the library to enhance the experience with BingBee, and vice-versa.

I'll post one or two pictures soon.

We've deployed Bwini's 3D XoX activity in our building foyer (coming shortly to Raglan Road too.) It uses Microsoft's XNA gaming framework, so the big technical deal is that we've managed to integrate BingBee and XNA successfully. We're still fine-tuning the User-Interaction aspects.

I've put together an XNA special interest group (seven of us) which includes four honours projects, looking at Microsoft's XNA gaming tools for new spatial and 3-D activities for BingBee. We should have at least two significant new "additions" coming out of this.