An Hour (or more) of Code

This week, students around the world are participating in the Hour of Code - an introduction to Computer Science. For the first time, our entire school is taking part. Here are some highlights of our work, and some of our plans for the near future.

Last week, we began by introducing basic mouse and touch pad skills. Children practiced dragging and dropping with both of these technologies. Children independently completed these puzzles and had some fun creating these pizzas. By the end, all of the children expressed a strong preference for using a mouse instead of a trackpad.

While developing some comfort with our technology, we also began looking at coding with activities that reinforce giving and following clear commands. Ask your child about the flurb who loves sparkles! (Or learn about this activity here.)

After getting comfortable with one and two step commands, we spent two sessions working with your sixth grade buddies on writing code to make an angry bird get to a caterpillar. If you want to try these activities at home, you can find them here. Children have completed all or some of stage 4 and stage 5. Next week we'll begin stage 6 with our buddies. The sixth graders were exceptionally patient and thoughtful teachers.

If you are looking to engage in more online coding at home, rather than use the program we are using at school, I suggest you check out Scratch Jr (which requires a Tablet) or The Foos (which works on more platforms). That way, your child won't be bored (I hope) when we move our way through the code.org tutorials in school.

We've also begun learning how to program our class robot, the Bee-Bot. Bee-Bot can move forward, backwards, and turn clockwise and counter clockwise. We'll be working with bee-bot approximately once a week as part of our math curriculum.

Tomorrow, I'll be sending home calendars to start tracking the lunar calendar, because after Chanukah we'll be doing a short science unit on the phases of the moon. All the directions will be
in your child's folder.

Happy Chanukah and see you tonight!