First week of school ... Karel the Robot!

We finished the first week of school.  Our high school building is still under construction but, somehow our custodians and administration were able to get enough rooms together to start school.  Actually, everything went well.

In Genetics, we have started with our regeneration lab of planaria.  We spent some time backgrounding the problems with regeneration ... also, visited some of the websites of various labs around the world that work with this model organism.  This lab will continue for two weeks while the planaria regenerate their heads/eyes/brain.  We are also reviewing some big concepts from freshman biology starting with biochemistry.  One Monday, we will play Biochem Poker for review and then start reviewing replication-transcription-translation.

My Selected Topics in Science class third block has the maximum students in it and is a collaborative class ...  This class samples five areas of science over the semester.  biology, chemistry astronomy, earth science and physics. It is mostly citizenship science, that is, science students can use in their life after school.  We are presently in biology and will move on to earth science in 3-4 weeks,

Introduction to Computer Science has started with Karel the Robot.  A programming primer for learning logic and program structure.  We have completed the first four very easy problems this week and will be moving on to decision statement next week ... if-then and if-then-else.

This weekend I am planting some more late buckwheat and helping our daughter look for a car before she moves to Ann Arbor, MI.

A good first week of school.

Karel is an educational programming language for beginners, created by Richard E. Pattis in his book Karel The Robot: A Gentle Introduction to the Art of Programming. Pattis used the language in his courses at Stanford University, California. The language is named after Karel Čapek, a Czech writer who introduced the word robot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_(programming_language)