Alexander Pruss's Blog

Philosophy Departments often try to attract undergraduates by telling them about instrumental benefits of philosophy classes: learning gener...

When I was a kid, I had a Radio Shack Microcomputer Trainer. This device was programmable in machine code, and was a 4-bit system with 112 n...

Years ago, for my older kids' coding education, I made a Minecraft mod  that lets you program in Python. Now I made a Scratch extension ...

When I taught calculus, the average grade on the final exam was around 55%. One could make the case that this means that our grading system ...

My 11-year-old complained to me that his mathematics teacher tells them things without proof. This made me realize that the sorts of things ...

I made an Instructable giving the curriculum I used for a mini-course for gifted middle- and high-school kids teaching programming by makin...

My RaspberryJamMod , which enables the Minecraft PI API for Python programming , has been updated to work with Minecraft/Forge 1.10. Still a...

I've been teaching programming to gifted kids using AgentCubesOnline . Consistently, kids want to make games where scary things chase yo...

I just updated RaspberryJamMod , which allows one to run python code in Minecraft (using a variant of the Raspberry PI Minecraft API), to wo...

A lot of worthwhile texts, both fiction and nonfiction, make direct reference to particular sports or use sports analogies or metaphors. The...

One of my hobbies is computer science education for children. Over the past year or so, I've been developing Raspberry Jam Mod (require...

There is a fashion in certain quarters these days to criticize the lavishness of student recreational facilities, and their effect on the co...

I've been sensitized to the fact that there are many children who have no access to a PC but do have access to a smartphone. So in the i...

I think computer programming should be taught from early grades, both in order to expand the mind and to be able to use the computing tools ...

Here's a very quick slightly weekend-morning educational project to do with kids. To make it more educational, one can try to have kid...

My 6-year-old son and I built this copper pipe glockenspiel. Full build instructions with more photos are here.

Here's a fun set of experiments to do with kids. You need two pennies, two nickels and a voltmeter that can show voltages of the order ...

Here are  instructions for a paper craft sundial  I built last night.  The hard part was doing the trigonometry for getting the gnomon t...

I wanted to make something for Instructables' clocks contest , and I settled on a sundial.  I then opted for an analemmatic sundial ...

Inspired by stuff on the web (e.g., here ), I went hunting for micrometeorites. I wrapped a magnet with plastic wrap, and ran it through th...