Scratch and Binomial Walks

I am at the #bit15 conference and attended the Coding and Math session with @georgegadanidis.  We learned a little Scratch programming.

We did the requisite square and circle creation tasks.  He had some nice connections to higher level math - including extending a two coin toss scenario to the binomial theorem.  At that point, I worked on my program to make the cat do a binomial walk - not realizing that he would have that example later.  I have shared my project at https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/86529699/ and embedded it below:

The cat should start moving when you click the green flag.  In the offline Scratch editor, you can export the list of horizontal positions where 0 is the centre.  I then imported it into Fathom to make a histogram.

Looks pretty binomial to me!

I am using Twitter as part of our #mmmmECOO presentation - my handle is @rossisen.

Trying out Trello

A real nugget came through by Google Reader from Joel on Software - the guy behind the Joel Test of how good a software team is (mathclips.ca gets at most 3/12 on it, BTW).  His company, Fog Creek Software, produces Trello, an online collaboration tool, that is currently free.

The CLIPS team has been trying it out for a couple of weeks and I think it is really promising.  The notification history provides a progress log.  You can create multiple checklists and easily monitor progress and you can send notifications to specific members of the team.  You can see how the Trello team uses it, by going to their development board, likely after you have signed up.  Best of all, it feels like the value of using it exceeds the effort of maintaining it.

I expect that my massive following (100 readers according to Google Reader) will flood their servers to the breaking point moments after I press the Publish button since no one I have mentioned it to has heard about it.  Here is their announcement video which is a good introduction: