Technologies Used in the GREAT Summer Camp

The GREAT summer camp uses a number of computer science and robotics environments that are designed to help students learn the excitement of engineering. Many of these programs are available for free download if a student wishes to continue exploration of these topics.

Scratch

Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

Alice

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

LEGO Mindstorms

LEGO Mindstorms robotics makes interacting with the real world fun and accessible. These systems provide sensors of light, sound, and distance, a small computer brain, and motors to move around, all in an easy to build LEGO-style package.

Arduino

Arduino is taking the tech world by storm, making embedded sensors and computers fun to play and build with. This small embedded system can control lights, motors, and all sorts of sensors.

Python

Python is a powerful scripting language used in applications ranging from websites to molecular visualization systems. It is seeing a surge of interest for use in introductory CS courses due to its low overhead for getting programs running.