Monthly Archives: May 2021

The Thilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

Author: James Gleick
Publisher: Editorial UOC
ISBN: 9788491163374
Review: The most dynamic duo in Victorian London: Charles Babbage, the accidental inventor of the computer and his colleague Ada, countess of Lovelace, a peculiar proto-programmer and daughter of Lord Byron. When Lovelace transcribed Babbage’s construction plans for a huge analytical engine machine back in 1842, she added notes three times longer than the original text. Their notes contain the first appearance of the general theory of computing, one hundred years before the real first computer was built. Sadly, Lovelace died of cancer ten years later after her work was published, and Babbage’s machines were never built.

Ada’s Algorithm

Title: Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age
Author: James Essinger
Publisher: ALBA TRAYECTOS
ISBN: 97884-90651384
Review: 150 years after Ada’s Lovelace death, a well-known computer program was named Ada, after the one and only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron. Her crucial, but often forgotten, contribution was acknowledge in first place by mathematicians such as Alan Turing. Nowadays her work is considered groundbreaking in the digital age. Her mother, Annabella Milbanke, abandoned her husband in 1816. In her determination of moving her daughter away from ‘Byron craziness’, Ada received a really strict education focused on Mathematics in order to avoid giving free rein to his imagination. However, the young girl was already thinking about the flying machine at thirteen. At nineteen Ada knew Charles Babbage, designer of The Analytical Engine (a really sophisticate calculator), and she saw the endless possibilities of this new discovery. Her contribution was vital, in fact, as long as she was the one who distinguished between data and processing, an essential knowledge in computer science. James Essinger narrates in a detailed and entertaining manner the circumstances and development of this unusual talent flourishing in the middle of the parental fears of her stubborn mother and the legacy of her fiery father. An intimate portrait of the short but remarkable life of Ada Lovelace framed in the context of London high-class society in the nineteenth century.

Super Mario Bros

Instructions

  1. Press the green flag to start the game and the red button to end it.
  2. Press “play” to start the game.
  3. Press “instructions” to see the instructions of the game.
  4. Press “credits” to see the game credits.

Notes

The video game has not been recreated faithfully on Scratch. There is only one level created by the author to show the adaptation of this game into Scratch. Besides, to make it more difficult, the player only has one life.

To access the page where the video game is, you can go to this link –> Super Mario Bros

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Duck Hunt

History

Duck hunt is a first person shooter launched by Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It was developed and published by Nintendo in 1984 in Japan. The game came with a gun so the player could aim to the screen and pull the trigger. It was a best seller in American territory.

The video game was produced by Gumpei Yoko who already had experience with this kind of games. He developed other projects but they were a money loss for Nintendo. In spite of that, he risks with Duck Hunt and the video game turned out to be a huge success.

Objective

The player has to hunt as many ducks he/she can. For that, you use a gun to aim at the ducks that appear on the screen and shoot at them. You only have three bullets per duck and you have to hunt minimum 6 ducks to get to the next round. In each round the difficulty will increase.

Instructions

  1. Press the green flag to start the game and the red button to end it.
  2. Press “play” to start the game and then you can choose the difficulty among “novice”, “normal” or “advanced”.
  3. Press “instructions” to see the instructions of the game.
  4. Press “credits” to see the game credits.

To access the page where the video game is, you can go to this link –> Duck Hunt

Frogger

Instructions

  1. Press the green flag to start the game and the red button to end it.
  2. Press “play” to start the game and then you can choose the difficulty among “novice”, “normal” or “advanced”.
  3. Press “instructions” to see the instructions of the game.
  4. Press “credits” to see the game credits.

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Donkey Kong

Instructions

  1. Press the green flag to start the game and the red button to finish.
  2. When you start the game, there is an animation showing Donkey Kong breaking the floor. When it is finished, press “1” to start the game.
  3. When the game is finished, press “score” to get the maximum score as well as the last game points.
  4. In the instructions you could find all the information you need to play.

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Pac Man

Instructions

  1. Press the green flag to start the game and the red button to finish.
  2. Press the space bar to start the game.
  3. Once the game is finished, press “score” to get the maximum score as well as the last game points.
  4. In the instructions you could find all the information you need to play.

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