Following hot on the heels of Code.org founder's interview that computer programming in the schools should be one of the most enjoyable parts of the learning day, comes this BBC news short about a pilot project in Iceland, Skema, that not only supports this mindset, but takes it one step further, emphasizing the social capital kids gain when you encourage peer-based learning. As a special point of interest, Skema highlights the profound benefits that peer based learning in a computer lab offers special needs kids, such as those diagnosed with ADHD and Asperger's. Very forward thinking and a nice educational psychology approach to contextual learning. Thanks to Matthew Reames, Program Director of the UVa Saturday and Summer Enrichment Program for bringing this to me.

Did anyone see the pinata animation game that Google posted on their homepage last week in honor of their 15th anniversary? It's that kind of animation "eye candy" that I teach to help kids have fun learning programming ;) So, I hope all you Alice and Scratch programmers were thinking about all the elements that went into building that simple game! I took a quick inventory and noted:

**bouncing letters
**the little "g" had 2 costumes
**the stick changed position controlled by the space bar
**the pinata's velocity was changed dependent on the number of times the stick touched it
**when velocity reached a certain value, the candy sprites appeared and changed -y coordinate (fell ground-ward)
**the game kept track of "high score"

And the best part, all of these elements are easily programmable using Scratch. So, a nice classroom challenge for your intermediate to advanced Scratch users could be to have the class navigate to the Googe Doodle website, and select one of the games to replicate. I built a pinata game and while doing so, came up with ways to make it my own, so this exercise is not simply a "copy this" exercise, but a nice warm up to stoke the creative mind.