Tips and Links

General Tips for Success in Tech Class

Your success in tech class depends on your success at following instructions.  Expectations, instructions, and tips are all on the website.  Carefully review everything on the web page for your assignment, with particular attention to the minimum expectations.

Use your resources such as the tech class website and Scratch website.

Please ask questions if something doesn’t make sense.  Technology has its own vocabulary — please ask if there is a word that is new to you or is being used differently than you expect.

Mr. James wants you to succeed and is available for questions by email at pjames@st-johnschool.org and for individual or small group after school study sessions by appointment.

Scratch

The Scratch Wiki has many great articles on how to accomplish specific objectives in your Scratch programs, for example:

Simulating Gravity using physics or trigonometry, as well as some simpler methods that work OK for games requiring jumping but are not really very accurate simulations of gravity.

There is also a dedicated Scratch Tips page right here on the tech class website with more tips on how to get answers to your Scratch “how do I…” questions.

Minecraft

MinecraftEdu comes with some predefined male and female student skins.  If you have a skin on your personal Minecraft account, you can use it in class:  just choose to log into MinecraftEdu using your Minecraft account.  If anyone wants to help make some custom St. John skins (Marymount plaid anyone?  Gray hoodies?) , here is a video showing the steps required.  Just give me the two image files you end up with for each skin and I will take care of the rest to get it onto our class server.