TKP Tips: Making a SmallBasic runnable flash drive

We discovered a shortcut that makes teaching #TKP courseware with SmallBasic even easier.  You can put everything you need for each pair of students on a single flash drive – SmallBasic, SmallBasic Extensions, Courseware, etc… AND you can run SmallBasic itself directly from this drive.  So there’s no need to install anything on a the machine you are running on.  The machine just needs to have .NET Framework 3.5 w/SP1 or greater (Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7).  Here’s what you need to do to set it up:

1) Download SmallBasic onto a flash drive.
2) Install it on the Flash Drive
3) Download the SmallBasic extensions (from CodePlex) onto the Flash Drive and unzip
4) Copy the unzipped files (Proctor.txt, SmallBasicFun.dll, SmallBasicFun.XML) into the ..Microsoft\SmallBasic\lib folder as shown below:

Now you can launch SmallBasic directly from the Flash Drive.  To do so you just need to follow the direction below:

1) Double-click the SB.exe icon as shown highlighted below

In the flash drive you will find some other goodies in the included ‘Resources’ folder that you may want to use:

1) Recipes – a zip file that contains all 14 recipes – just unzip and enjoy!
2) Slides – a pdf file that contains slides covering core programming concepts, such as ‘For’ loops, ‘If’ statements, etc…
3) More – inside of the unzipped Recipes, we’ve added our new Homework exercises

These are shown below:

If you’d like to just unzip our drive, get the SmallBasicFlashDrive.zip file here.

Let us know how this works for you – and watch for new recipes and new teacher training resources at TKP soon.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 08, 2011
  Thanks Lynn, I'll check it out. BTW, isn't it ironic that "small" basic requires .NET 3.5... :)  This is probably the first time you have ever heard this, isn't it?

• Anonymous
  June 13, 2011
  Thanks