Scratch: Programming for Teachers

Programming is becoming a more and more important skill to have. Childhood is a great time to start learning programming and to develop computational thinking, creativity, and problem- solving skills. In this course you will learn the basics of programming and how to teach it yourself as a primary or secondary school teacher. This MOOC teaches programming in Scratch through fun videos which explain programming in an inspiring and clear way. Every week you build a different Scratch project yourself: a flappy bird game, a virtual pet or a Mondriaan like artwork. Also weekly, new programming blocks are taught and together we’re working on ways to improve your written code. In addition, you will learn how you can integrate the same programming lessons in your class for both primary and secondary education. Many programming principles covered in Scratch also apply to other programming languages such as JavaScript and Python. An introduction to Python as well as hardware such as robotics and a micro:bit are a part of this online course should you want to broaden your scope. The content of this course is based on a course that was used in primary schools in The Netherlands with great success. The material follows the educational curriculum for programming in primary education of The Netherlands.

Material Type: Full Course

Author: dr. F. Hermans

The Programming Historian 2: Transliterating non-ASCII characters with Python

This lesson shows how to use Python to transliterate automatically a list of words from a language with a non-Latin alphabet to a standardized format using the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) characters. It builds on readers’ understanding of Python from the lessons “Viewing HTML Files,” “Working with Web Pages,” “From HTML to List of Words (part 1)” and “Intro to Beautiful Soup.” At the end of the lesson, we will use the transliteration dictionary to convert the names from a database of the Russian organization Memorial from Cyrillic into Latin characters. Although the example uses Cyrillic characters, the technique can be reproduced with other alphabets using Unicode.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: Seth Bernstein

Using Open Data as a Material for Introductory Programming Assignments

This case study is retrieved from the open book Open Data as Open Educational Resources. Case studies of emerging practice. It explores why and how open data can be used as a material with which to produce engaging challenges for students as they are introduced to programming. Through describing the process of producing the assignments, and learner responses to them, we suggest that open data is a powerful material for designing learning activities because of its qualities of ease of access and authenticity. In two successive years, forms of open data were used to construct coursework assignments for postgraduate students at the University of Nottingham, UK. The rationale for using open data was to shift the focus towards an outward-looking approach to coding with networks, files and data structures, and to engage students in constructing applications that had real-world relevance. Python was chosen as the programming language. The assignment in the first year utilised e-book text files from Project Gutenberg1, and required students to build an e-reader application. In the next year, car park status data, which was made available in a regularly updated form by the city council through their open data initiative2 was used as the basis for an assignment in which students developed a city-wide car park monitoring application.

Material Type: Case Study

Author: Tim Coughlan

The Programming Historian 2: Applied Archival Downloading with Wget

Now that you have learned how Wget can be used to mirror or download specific files from websites like ActiveHistory.ca via the command line, it’s time to expand your web-scraping skills through a few more lessons that focus on other uses for Wget’s recursive retrieval function. The following tutorial provides three examples of how Wget can be used to download large collections of documents from archival websites with assistance from the Python programing language. It will teach you how to parse and generate a list of URLs using a simple Python script, and will also introduce you to a few of Wget’s other useful features. Similar functions to the ones demonstrated in this lesson can be achieved using curl, an open-source software capable of performing automated downloads from the command line. For this lesson, however, we will focus on Wget and building your Python skills.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: Kellen Kurschinski

The Programming Historian 2: Installing QGIS 2.0 and Adding Layers

In this lesson you will install QGIS software, download geospatial files like shapefiles and GeoTIFFs, and create a map out of a number of vector and raster layers. Quantum or QGIS is an open source alternative to the industry leader, ArcGIS from ESRI. QGIS is multiplatform, which means it runs on Windows, Macs, and Linux and it has many of the functions most commonly used by historians. ArcGIS is prohibitively expensive and only runs on Windows (though software can be purchased to allow it to run on Mac). However, many universities have site licenses, meaning students and employees have access to free copies of the software (try contacting your map librarian, computer services, or the geography department). QGIS is ideal for those without access to a free copy of Arc and it is also a good option for learning basic GIS skills and deciding if you want to install a copy of ArcGIS on your machine. Moreover, any work you do in QGIS can be exported to ArcGIS at a later date if you decide to upgrade. The authors tend to use both and are happy to run QGIS on Mac and Linux computers for basic tasks, but still return to ArcGIS for more advanced work. In many cases it is not lack of functions, but stability issues that bring us back to ArcGIS. For those who are learning Python with the Programming Historian, you will be glad to know that both QGIS and ArcGIS use Python as their main scripting language.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Authors: Niche Canada, Roy Rosenzweig

The Programming Historian 2: Counting Frequencies

Your list is now clean enough that you can begin analyzing its contents in meaningful ways. Counting the frequency of specific words in the list can provide illustrative data. Python has an easy way to count frequencies, but it requires the use of a new type of variable: the dictionary. Before you begin working with a dictionary, consider the processes used to calculate frequencies in a list.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble

The Programming Historian 2: Working With Web Pages

This lesson introduces Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and explains how to use Python to download and save the contents of a web page to your local hard drive.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble

Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers

Think Stats is an introduction to Probability and Statistics for Python programmers. *Think Stats emphasizes simple techniques you can use to explore real data sets and answer interesting questions. The book presents a case study using data from the National Institutes of Health. Readers are encouraged to work on a project with real datasets. *If you have basic skills in Python, you can use them to learn concepts in probability and statistics. Think Stats is based on a Python library for probability distributions (PMFs and CDFs). Many of the exercises use short programs to run experiments and help readers develop understanding.

Material Type: Textbook

Author: Allen Downey

The Programming Historian 2: Intro to Beautiful Soup

This tutorial assumes basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and the Document Object Model. It also assumes some knowledge of Python. For a more basic introduction to Python, see Working with Text Files.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: Jeri Wieringa

The Programming Historian 2: Output Data as an HTML File

This lesson takes the frequency pairs created in Counting Frequencies and outputs them to an HTML file. Here you will learn how to output data as an HTML file using Python. You will also learn about string formatting. The final result is an HTML file that shows the keywords found in the original source in order of descending frequency, along with the number of times that each keyword appears.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble

The Programming Historian 2: Working with Text Files

In this lesson you will learn how to manipulate text files using Python. This includes opening, closing, reading from, and writing to .txt files. The next few lessons will involve downloading a web page from the Internet and reorganizing the contents into useful chunks of information. You will be doing most of your work using Python code written and executed in Komodo Edit.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble

The Programming Historian 2: From HTML to List of Words (part 2)

In this lesson, you will learn the Python commands needed to implement the second part of the algorithm begun in the From HTML to a List of Words (part 1). The first half of the algorithm gets the content of an HTML page and saves only the content that follows the tags.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration

Author: William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble

Facial Recognition/Artificial Intelligence

Asking the question, “What is human-computer interaction - artificial intelligence? Students come to understand what artificial intelligence is in most everyday life, discussing the privacy, pros and cons of this topic and exploring with artificial intelligence activities online. This lesson plan includes using the Google Vision Kit to explore various pre-loaded facial recognition programs and advance programming students can access the Python code, manipulate the code and test the changes.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Author: Denise Hoag

Digital Media (Course Files)

This set of course materials includes lecture slides, activity files, images, quizzes, tests, review questions, and project assignments for Digital Media at Georgia Gwinnett College. The course uses open-source applications such as GIMP and InkScape. Individual chapters are available for download due to the large file sizes. Web-based assignments to supplement these materials are located on the GGC Wiki: All Digital Media Assignments Topics covered include: Digital Images Image Processing Audio Processing Video Processing Creating Animation

Material Type: Full Course

Authors: Kairui Chen, Shuhua Chen

Exploring Movie Construction and Production

What's so exciting about movies? Short Description: Return to milneopentextbooks.org to download PDF and other versions of this textNewParaExploring Movie Construction & Production contains eight chapters of the major areas of film construction and production. The discussion covers theme, genre, narrative structure, character portrayal, story, plot, directing style, cinematography, and editing. Important terminology is defined and types of analysis are discussed and demonstrated. An extended example of how a movie description reflects the setting, narrative structure, or directing style is used throughout the book to illustrate building blocks of each theme. This approach to film instruction and analysis has proved beneficial to increasing students’ learning, while enhancing the creativity and critical thinking of the student.NewPara Long Description: Exploring Movie Construction & Production contains eight chapters of the major areas of film construction and production. The discussion covers theme, genre, narrative structure, character portrayal, story, plot, directing style, cinematography, and editing. Important terminology is defined and types of analysis are discussed and demonstrated. An extended example of how a movie description reflects the setting, narrative structure, or directing style is used throughout the book to illustrate building blocks of each theme. This approach to film instruction and analysis has proved beneficial to increasing students’ learning, while enhancing the creativity and critical thinking of the student. Word Count: 33481 ISBN: 978-1-942341-46-8 (Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

Material Type: Textbook

Author: John Reich

Film Aesthetics (Open Course)

This open set of course materials for Film Aesthetics is a downloadable version of a course created for a learning management system. Included are learning modules and a quiz bank based on introductory film concepts including the following topics: Narrative Structure and Motifs, Mise-en-Scene, Cinematography, Sound Design, Music, and Visual Effects.

Material Type: Full Course

Authors: Elizabeth Lathrop, Thomas Anderson

Moving Pictures:An Introduction to Cinema

Short Description: A free and open-source introduction to the art and science of moving pictures, offering in-depth exploration of how cinema communicates, and what, exactly, it is trying to say. Long Description: A free and open-source introduction to the art and science of cinema. From the earliest iterations to the latest innovations, this introductory text explores the tools and techniques of mise-en-scene, narrative form, cinematography, editing, sound and acting, how each has contributed to the evolution of cinematic language, and how that evolution implicates critical issues of representation in mass media. Moving Pictures offers in-depth examination of how cinema communicates, and what, exactly, it is trying to say. Author Contact: russell.sharman@gmail.com Word Count: 55639 (Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

Material Type: Textbook

Author: Russell Leigh Sharman

Graphic Design and Print Production Fundamentals

Short Description: This textbook — written by a group of select experts with a focus on different aspects of the design process, from creation to production — addresses the many steps of creating and then producing physical, printed, or other imaged products that people interact with on a daily basis. It covers the concept that, while most modern graphic design is created on computers using design software, the ideas and concepts don’t stay on the computer. The ideas need to be completed in the computer software, then progress to an imaging (traditionally referred to as printing) process. Keywords are highlighted throughout and summarized in a Glossary at the end of the book, and each chapter includes exercises and suggested readings. Long Description: This textbook is written by a group of select experts with a focus on different aspects of the design process, from creation to production. Traditionally referred to as graphic design, communication design is the process by which messages and images are used to convey information to a targeted audience. It is within this spectrum that this textbook addresses the many steps of creating and then producing physical, printed, or other imaged products that people interact with on a daily basis. Design itself is only the first step. It is important when conceiving of a new design that the entire workflow through to production is taken into consideration. And while most modern graphic design is created on computers, using design software such as the Adobe suite of products, the ideas and concepts don’t stay on the computer. To create in-store signage, for instance, the ideas need to be completed in the computer software, then progress to an imaging (traditionally referred to as printing) process. This is a very wide-reaching and varied group of disciplines. Each chapter begins with a list of Learning Objectives, and concludes with Exercises and a list of Suggested Readings on the Summary page. Throughout, key terms are noted in bold and listed again in a Glossary at the end of the book. Word Count: 69165 ISBN: 978-1-989623-67-1 (Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

Material Type: Textbook