Friday, December 13, 2013

A little bit of holiday in the hour of code

Kudos to Scratch for their easy-to-follow tutorials for students. It makes it easier to win over teachers and students into the world of coding when programming can be put into layman's terms.

Since I don't have a regular class anymore, I decided to change things up for my weekly Tech Stars (students in grades 3-5 who love technology - what's not to love, right?) Instead of working on our current project, we participated in the Scratch holiday card. Though not advanced, my students were able to leave - after 40 minutes - with a nearly finished, animated holiday card.

In the process, they learned order and procedure, if and then, plot development and more. From deciding which action needed to come first to picking out the right (or wrong) character for the setting, students mastered many of the state standards. Reason number one for bringing in code into the regular classroom.

We will continue to bring in code into our program. Now, it's time to bring in code into the regular classroom to help students with higher order thinking.

What do you think about code in the classroom?

Check out our works-in-progress (some were meant to be comical) from 4th and 5th grade students in a 40 minute class:









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