The Digital Adventures Blog
For parents, educators and students to discuss tech education for kids, best practices for teaching coding & engineering design to kids & emerging technology trends
Featured Posts
Parents Should Win the 2020 Teacher of the Year Award
Teachers are a very special group. My mother was a teacher. Many members of my extended family are teachers. I’m married to a teacher. I also run an education technology company that employs teachers to guide students in learning how to build with technology. In essence, I have the utmost respect and the highest regard for teachers. In many ways, one could argue that everyone who has ever learn...
How to Build a Simple Smoke Animation Effect in Scratch
While we often focus on making sure that we are programming character movement along with the subsequent events and actions to simulate interactive game play, visual effects are also an important element of making great projects. A simple effect that makes your project more realistic will provide more enjoyment to the user and more satisfaction to the developer. Often it can take just as much t...
3 Ways to Create a Great Online Learning Experience for Kids
For the past several weeks, Digital Adventures has completely transitioned our instructor guided, in-person studio classes over to an online format. While this switch has not been easy, we have learned a lot about our students, our families, ourselves, and our business.Through the process of working with these various groups, we have identified 3 key elements to creating a great online learning...
How to Build a Simple Bubble Animation Effect in Scratch
While we often focus on making sure that we are programming character movement along with the subsequent events and actions to simulate interactive game play, visual effects are also an important element of making great projects. A simple effect that makes your project more realistic will provide more enjoyment to the user and more satisfaction to the developer. Often it can take just as much t...
3 ways for kids to build community during difficult times
Over the past few weeks, New York City & Los Angeles made the difficult decision to shut down their respective school districts for the remainder of the year. Earlier this week, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker followed suit and closed all schools in the entire state for the balance of the year. This means that the 3 largest school districts in the entire country which collectively teach milli...
This is NOT a NEW normal. Parents need support!
Within a few short weeks, many of us have had our lives turned completely upside down. As humans, we have an incredible resiliency and grit. These characteristics means that we fight hard to figure things out as best we can in a rapid amount of time. However, just because we are figuring things out and doing what we can with a very challenging situation does not mean that this is a NEW normal. ...
7 Simple Tips to Help Your Kid Become a Zoom Expert
All across the globe, educators, parents and students have been thrust into a new normal. Instead of attending classes in person at school, many of us are now taking advantage of the latest advances in technology to live-stream our education. While it may seem like it should be a seamless transition, the reality is that for many kids this is a brand new environment that has similar elements to...
Developing students into independent technologists
At Digital Adventures, our entire curriculum is centered around developing students into independent technologists. Understanding how to code is critical, but it's not enough. So our curriculum is divided into three main areas: coding, problem-solving and social-emotional skills. As students grow in these areas, they progress through our 6 Levels of development. By the time students reach Level...
5 Quick Tips for Zoom Educators
At Digital Adventures, we recently made the decision to shift our entire programs over to an online format. Instead of hosting classes & camps for kids in our state-of-the-art technology learning studio, we have now shifted to a online livestream format using video conferencing technology. Since we started the company in 2015, our instructors have taught thousands of kid. In the process, w...
How to build 3 types of Events & Actions using Scratch
One of the key skills necessary when building projects is introducing events and actions. One of the most popular types of events is collisions. There are times when you want the character to have a certain behavior when it collides into another character, other times you want the character’s behavior to be based on an interaction with a specific color and other times you want behavior to be ba...
3 Ways to Make Kids' Screen Time Beneficial
As the use of technology-based devices has exploded, adults have started to ask critical questions about the role that technology plays in the lives of their children. This is often the case when anything new is introduced and not well understood. Underlying this discussion is the reality that many adults feel that technology plays an outsized role in their lives and so they want a more healthy...
Why your first lesson at Digital Adventures will be in Scratch
Since we started Digital Adventures in 2015, our team has had the pleasure of working with thousands of students in our technology learning studios, with school partners and when we host special events. Our curriculum library has over 500 projects that span 15-20 different hardware and software platforms. Yet, when a new student is just getting started with us, their very first project will be ...
How Minecraft Modding Became a Great Tech Teaching Platform for Kids
Minecraft Mods are features or tweaks added into the game of Minecraft that can be programmed and implemented by just about anyone. These mods have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times and have been an integral part of the explosive growth of the Minecraft community. Even if a Minecraft enthusiast does not use mods, there is a great chance that their favorite YouTuber does! When Digita...
How to build video game coin animations in Scratch
For those who grew up playing video games, there are key elements of gaming that you may not often consider - coin animations. The movement and the sounds associated with activity in a video game is an important part of the user experience. In this tutorial, we will go through how to create different coin animations using Scratch. Estimated tutorial time: 60-75 minutes.Below is a preview of the...
My kid did Hour of Code, what now?
In 2014, the non-profit organization, code.org, launched the Hour of Code. Hour of Code was designed to be a quick, 1 hour introduction to computer science. Since getting started, Hour of Code has expanded to 180 countries and reached millions of students around the world.As one might imagine, a proper introduction is designed to get someone excited and ideally motivate and inspire them to wan...