Both Halloween and the Hour of Code have been on my mind lately, so I was excited to find this post on “5 Ideas for a Spooky Scratch-o-ween.” Since I teach gifted students from K-5 in my school, many of my older students have used Scratch. Some of them like to use it to create presentations or make games. However, my newer students need an introduction on how use this block coding tool. I particularly like the suggestion to animate some appropriate Halloween jokes using Scratch (or Scratch Jr. on the iPads). Here is a link to some goofy Halloween jokes that are good for elementary students. Rosemary Slattery shows some brief examples of animated Scratch Halloween jokes here. Robots are also fun to program for joke-telling. We’ve used the Dash robot as a comedian in the past, and it is a new challenge for the students to find a way to code it so the timing works between the joke and the punchline.
Speaking of punchlines, what kind of roads do ghosts haunt? Dead ends, of course. (You’ll find that in the list of jokes linked above.)
