If you are looking for a fun way to target social communication skills, as well as beginning computer programming, Robot Turtles is a great new board game you can play with your students (with or without autism). Robot Turtles requires players to use simple commands to move their turtles to capture a jewel on the game board. When students give commands, they are replicating the process computer programmers use to give instructions for a computer to execute. Games, in general, provide opportunities for social communication; Robot Turtles in particular involves specific interactions between the game players that enable more opportunities for social communication. For students who show an interest in games and computers, playing Robot Turtles can be a highly engaging way to practice social co[...]

// Use two forward slashes for a single-line comment /* Use a forward slash followed by an asterisk to start a multi-line comment. To end the multi-line comment, use an asterisk followed by a forward slash. */ /* Did you know it's also possible to nest comments in Swift? /* You can nest comments by starting a multi-line comment, then starting another. */ Finally, close the last (two) comments */ These examples demonstrate how to write different types of comments in Swift. As you might be aware, Swift is a new OS X and iOS programming language announced this week at WWDC. After hearing the announcement, I immediately wanted to check it out because I enjoy coding iOS apps, even though I’m only a beginner (experienced programmers write a large majority of the code in our company’s[...]

“Honey, please set the timer to ten minutes.” Whether you know it or not, when uttering these words, you’re speaking in developer terminology. A developer is a person who creates software such as apps. A developer writes code, which is a series of commands - otherwise known as instructions - for a computer to execute. Why would you even care about knowing this terminology? Software is all around us, in our personal and professional lives. As technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, new developments impact us whether we embrace them or not. As adults, we can choose to keep pace with these changes or do our best to ignore them. But, for the children we serve in our practice, there is an increasingly accepted feeling that learning about technology is a necessity, not a choice, if t[...]

This week, December 9-15, is Computer Science Education Week with several websites determined to increase awareness regarding coding (aka computer programming). One of the websites, code.org, has an initiative called The Hour of Code, which provides anyone with free access to learn coding for an hour. The initiative is seeking 10 million individuals who are willing to participate, hoping that many of these individuals will pursue an estimated 1.4 million computer science jobs expected by the year 2020. Our owner, Eric Sailers, has already participated in The Hour of Code: https://twitter.com/esailers/status/410073570660732928. Plus, he is planning to educate his students this week about coding. Here is his lesson plan that may inspire you to do something similar with your students: [...]