Tickled Pink

HELLO BARBIE WORLD:   We had a busy weekend. Part of our activities included sewing costumes and building sets for a play that Annabelle is in at the end of May. We took time out Saturday afternoon to head to one of our favorite haunts, Living Computers: Museum + Labs (LCM).

This weekend they debuted their new Barbie display. Yes, Barbie. LCM has rolled out the pink carpet for Barbie.

As the song points out, it's "a Barbie World," and as LCM demonstrates, that world includes math, coding and big business. 

An interesting, surprising case of 'when worlds collide,' but LCM makes it work in a fun, engaging way.

Our main draw for the visit was so the kids could attend a programming workshop.

I'll let them tell you a bit more about it. Annabelle is up first ... 

I went to a workshop at Living Computers: Museum + Labs celebrating Ms. Pac-Man’s 36^th anniversary. The workshop showed us how to use Scratch to code our own simple versions of the Ms. Pac-Man game. The nice lady running our workshop taught us some of the basics of Scratch, like how to import sprites, how to make the sprites move, and how to use variables to keep track of things like score. She spoke very clearly and went at a nice, stable pace so everyone could catch up if need be. She offered plenty of help to those who needed it, which made the workshop easy and fun. I liked learning about how to use the basics of scratch to make your own game! I also shared the project I created at https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/153670452/ . If you want to play it, feel free! I had a lot of fun at LCM and I really love their workshops!

And here is CJ's take ...

As described over and over again in my previous posts, my family enjoys going to the Living Computer Museum. Most recently, we went for a programming event using Scratch (a popular free coding language made by MIT), with the intent to code a simple version of Pac-Man, Namco's classic 1980 arcade game.

While the event isn't fresh in my mind, here's what I remember:
The event started at 2 P.M, in one of LCM's class/theater rooms. The instructor was standing at a podium, in front of a large screen (showing the contents of her own screen). I sat down at a laptop in the center of the room, and started receiving instructions.

In the program, there were some preset things (like the background featuring the classic Pac-Man maze, and the basic sprites). However, I had to do most of the coding myself, with guidance from the instructor. One of the most important parts of the experience was coding Ms. Pac Man's movement, which ended up getting programmed into spaghetti code. I also had to make a pretzel fly around the board, and make it disappear upon being eaten. 

I really enjoyed my experience at the Living Computer Museum event. Yum, spaghetti code.

You *might* be able to see CJ's game here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/embed/153670549/?autostart  The link was a little sketchy when I tried it earlier.