Brandon Milonovich - Scratch Cookbook

Brandon Milonovich completed his Master's degree in Teaching and Curriculum with emphasis in Mathematics Education in December 2012 at Syracuse University in central New York. Prior to attending Syracuse, Brandon earned his Bachelor's degree in Adolescent Mathematics Education at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Brandon grew up in upstate New York with an interest in mathematics and computer science at a young age. Brandon has experience of teaching mathematical concepts to students using Scratch in third through fifth grade, as well as experience of teaching mathematics at the middle school, high school, and university level.

It was during Brandon's time at Saint Rose that he began his work with Scratch through an internship program with Computer Science professor Helen Albanese. In coordination with three Albany City School District teachers, Brandon developed an after-school program centered on programming in Scratch for at-risk youth. The program expanded the following year to include a broader age range of students. Now, Brandon works towards making learning Scratch more accessible within the classroom itself, both with traditional methods and flipped classroom-blended learning style concepts, to build the mathematical foundation students need to be successful 21st century learners. Brandon believes in sharing of information as broadly as possible, and so has presented with his colleagues at numerous conferences and workshops on Scratch, and hopes to continue to do so.

For more information on Brandon, or to contact him, visit http://www.bmilo.com.

I would like to thank all of those who have helped me along the way in both the process of writing this book, as well as becoming qualified to write it. Special thanks to Helen Albanese for her continued pushing to work more with Scratch and the opportunities she has provided, as well as a thank you to every professor I had at both the undergraduate and graduate level who have guided me along the way. Thanks also to the Albany City School District for opening its classrooms, particularly to Laurie Ellis, Stephen Costello, Alice Florence, and Timothy Fowler. The greatest thanks of all to my family for their constant support, guidance, and help. Without the amazing group of people I've been surrounded by throughout my life, I would have had little chance of success.

David Busby has been a Linux system's admin for around 12 years now and almost always being in a varied role over the years be it development, network admin, support, DBA changing onto a day-to-day basis.

Whenever time permits, he contributes to the EPEL packages for OpenStack and generally follows OpenStack's progress as much as possible.

He has an interest in Infosec, and as a result is generally paranoid about security. He is also familiar with Metasploit, sqlmap, john, and oclHashCat, and has also written a few python tools, and experimented in Golang.

He holds a 2nd Dan black belt in Ju-Jitsu and assists with teaching at a local non-profit club. He also helps to teach a computing class for children at a local school, using Raspberry Pi.

Stamati Crook is a professional programmer with his own software house and consultancy on the south coast of England. He has been involved in teaching Scratch to children at local primary schools and also hopes that his own three children will begin to show more interest in creating games rather than just playing them. His wife, Kathy, also uses Scratch daily in her classroom and you can find lesson plans and resources for children, parents, and teachers learning and teaching Scratch at http://www.redware.com/scratch.

Andrew Johns has been a web developer since 1999. He became a STEM Ambassador and Code Club volunteer in 2012, teaching Scratch to primary school children. He currently works for London-based design agency, Pretty, as a Technical Lead. This is the first book for which he has acted as a Technical Reviewer.

Martina Kabtov is a teacher and a researcher in the field of Computer Science education. After completing her PHD, she began to work as an Assistant Professor at Comenius University in Bratislava, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Department of Informatics Education. Among her responsibilities are several university lectures on programming, educational robotics, and research methodology. Currently, she focuses on educational programming (especial for very young children). She is an author of several study materials and many conference papers dealing with various aspects of Computer Science education. In 2013, she co-authored a book Transforming Schools in Digital Age , with Prof. Ivan Kala, which summarizes the role of digital technology in education. Martina Kabtov also illustrated this book and she is the author of many illustrations for other computer science textbooks, educational software, and MicroWorlds, and for the Slovak Bebras contest for children in informatics.

Pedro Neves Rito has been working as a professional trainer in the area of information technology and communications for more than 16 years, and as a teacher in higher education for the last six years. He has a Master's degree in Multimedia in Education and is currently a student of the Doctoral program in information systems and technologies. He has used Scratch as a tool for an introduction to programming. Lately, he's been exploring physical computing and Scratch, particularly the use of the Arduino, with the perspective of building activities for primary students. This work has been developed with the help of teachers of different levels of education.