If you haven’t signed up to participate in this week’s Hour of Code, it’s not too late. And, even if you don’t find it possible to get involved this week, I urge you to take a look at all of the wonderful resources. Consider showing your students the basics of programming, and let them take it from there.
I heard from a few people that they were having a hard time selecting where to start. The wealth of resources can be a bit overwhelming, especially if you do not have experience with programming. As someone who is relatively new to it, I understand completely. That’s why I thought I would devote today’s post to just one of the resources – Hopscotch.
Hopscotch is a free iPad app that is similar to a web-based open-source coding program developed by MIT called Scratch. But, don’t worry if you have never used either one. My exposure to them was pretty limited until a month ago.
I used Hopscotch with my 2nd grade GT class yesterday. There are 11 students in the class. They each had an iPad, but I think I probably should have had them share. If you have a full class of students, I would definitely recommend this – for the sake of your sanity and theirs.
The students had used Daisy the Dinosaur and Kodable before – both awesome coding apps. Daisy had kind of introduced them to using blocks to program, and I think it’s an excellent intro to Hopscotch. (They are both produced by the same company.)
Hopscotch has a great tutorial video (embedded below) that we used, and that’s what really helped me. I have messed around with Hopscotch, but never really knew what to do with it, or how to break it down for the students. Hopscotch does this all for you.
One thing I wished I had done before going through the video with the students was to talk about some of the vocabulary: rotate, opacity, line width, random.
Another thing you may want to check is to make sure you have the latest version of Hopscotch on the iPad. I thought I had done this, but then some of the menu items looked different on some iPads, causing a bit of confusion with directions.
We paused a lot during the video. To give you an idea, the video is 25 minutes long, and we barely finished in 90 minutes. Some of that extra time was exploration; some of it was troubleshooting (kids hitting the wrong button, iPads freezing, going ahead and missing directions, etc…). If you can, have older kids or parents help you out with this.
Once you go through the video, if your students want to continue using Hopscotch, I highly recommend visiting Wes Fryer’s blog here, where you can find additional ideas for using this app in the classroom. This includes a link to Wes’ ePub book of Hopscotch challenges. (If you download the ePub book, you may need to also download an ePub reader, such as Adobe Digital Editions.) The ePub book also explains how to share Hopscotch creations once they are completed.
I see lots of ways that Hopscotch can be integrated into the curriculum – particularly math. Discussion of angles (helpful to understand for the “Rotate” command), percent, creation of shapes or symmetrical drawings are just some of the ways it can tie in. Because it allows you to bring in text objects, other subjects could be easily reflected by creating Hopscotch games with vocabulary. If you search for ways to integrate Scratch into the core curriculum, as on this page, you can probably modify a lot of those ideas to work with Hopscotch.
For more ideas on using programming with kids, be sure to check out the Hour of Code link above, or my Programming for Kids Pinterest Board!
