Sarah Guthals

Sarah Guthals, PhD, co-founded an ed-tech company and now continues to build technology for kids to learn, create, and share safely online. She loves to teach teachers how to teach coding in the classroom.

Articles & Books From Sarah Guthals

Article / Updated 08-11-2023
You can earn a few different kinds of Minecraft badges. Here, you find out how to earn Scramble badges, which are different from the other types: All the code blocks you need are already in the programming area — they’re just scrambled around on the screen in an animation. To earn a Scramble badge, follow these steps: Test the correct version of the code in the simulator or Minecraft to see what it’s supposed to do, like saying “Hello, World!
Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-10-2023
When you first log in to GitHub.com, it can feel overwhelming. What is GitHub? GitHub is more than a place to store your code; it’s a community and a philosophy about how code should be written.When you’re first learning and navigating the website, you should always remember that the goal of GitHub is to provide a secure, collaborative environment where newcomers and experts alike can design, develop, and deploy any software, from programs that say “Hello World” to code that sequences human proteins to help cure major infectious diseases around the world.
Article / Updated 07-14-2022
When coding, it’s important to teach kids the basics of setting and finding position. Setting the position of an object means assigning it coordinates to put it in a specific place onscreen. Finding the position of an object means identifying its coordinates to know where it’s located. Using pseudocode While each programming language uses its own structure for setting and finding coordinates, a typical pseudocode expression you may write to set the position of an object looks like this: setx x-coordinate sety y-coordinate Or setposition (x-coordinate, y-coordinate) To find the current position of an object, you can write pseudocode for each separate coordinate: x-position for the x-coordinate of the object, and y-position for the y-coordinate of the object.
Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-27-2022
Coding is fast becoming a skill that every child needs to be educated for in the 21st Century. But coding is taught at only a small fraction of schools, and often only at the high school level. Helping kids learn how to code also means you’re assisting them in developing a skill that is highly marketable and sets them apart from peers at school and later, in their careers.
Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-24-2022
Modding Minecraft allows players to make large interactive modifications to their Minecraft worlds with a simple click of a button. Although you can build infinite mods, this book focuses on creating Minigames within Minecraft, where players can compete in single-player and multi-player mode. Designing and coding the Minigames requires coding, but with the help of LearnToMod, you can create your own Minigame to play with friends!
Article / Updated 01-24-2022
Modding (adding modifications to the game) is a great way to customize your experience in the game, and mods allow players to inject their own creativity into their open Minecraft worlds.One of the great things about Minecraft modding is that anyone and everyone can add their own spin on things. You have the ability to create your own mods, share them with the community, and gain notoriety for creating some cool in-game ideas!
Building 3D Digital Games
A technology book for kids!Do you want to create 3D digital games that'll impress your friends, family, and even yourself? This book shows you how to use Alice, a free 3D game programming environment, to make seriously cool video games you'll have as much fun building as you will playing! Create your own adventure—recreate your favorite story by giving the characters new choices and writing your own ending When zombies attack—make your very own escape room maze and attempt to defeat the enemy before it defeats youTechnology Requirements: Hardware – PC or tablet with internet connection running Windows® 7 or higher or Mac with internet connection running Mac OS X® 10.
Article / Updated 10-04-2019
Writing a great pull request in Git for your GitHub account is a bit of an art. For an open source project, much of the project’s communication with people occurs within pull requests.If you’re contributing to a project, your pull request is your chance to make a strong case for why your code should be pulled into the main branch.
Article / Updated 10-04-2019
GitHub, as the same would suggest, is built on Git. Git is a type of version control system, and it is free and open source, which means that anyone can use it, build on top of it, and even add to it.GitHub products make using Git easy, but if you’re curious, you can also use Git to track your solo projects on your computer.
Article / Updated 10-04-2019
GitHub has a feature that removes the need to host our app outside of GitHub, which can reduce the number of moving parts when extending GitHub. This feature is called GitHub Actions.GitHub Actions is one of the newer, most exciting features of GitHub. At the time of writing, it's still a beta feature. GitHub Actions makes it possible to create custom workflows on GitHub.