Since I have different grade levels each day, I have been doing Hour of Code all week. With my students I’ve done Hopscotch, Kodable, Robot Turtles, and several of the lessons on Code Studio. It has been an absolute blast! Yesterday, I asked my 4th graders to describe their feelings about their programming experience using figurative language, which we have been studying. Here are some of my favorite comments:
“Hour of Code was a football game with teammates patting you on the back when you worked your way to success.”
“When we did Hour of Code, I felt like a genius.”
“Hopscotch is a spark, ready to ignite with creativity, dreams, imagination, and fun!”
“Programming is as fun as playing with a bottlenose dolphin.”
And one that I can really relate to from one of my female students –
Many people think of boring strings of commands or structured logic when they hear “computer science” or “programming.” But I have witnessed incredible examples of creativity throughout the week. I know I already shared a Hopscotch video earlier this week, but I have to share this one, too:
If you haven’t tried Hour of Code with your students, please consider it! You and your students will find it to be a rewarding experience.
Yesterday was the beginning of Hour of Code week. Despite the fact that all of my students will be doing an activity with their classroom teachers this week, I wanted to incorporate it into GT as well. Feeling a bit adventurous, I decided to see how my 2nd graders would do on a Hopscotch tutorial that I did with my 5th graders last week.
I wouldn’t recommend jumping into the Food Fight Dodgeball tutorial if you’ve never used Hopscotch before. (The Paddleball tutorial is a good introduction.) However, I knew my 2nd graders would be doing the Paddleball one with their classroom teachers, and I wanted them to get some additional Hopscotch experience so they could help their classmates this week.
Two girls work on the Hopscotch app in my classroom
As we went through the tutorial, I was so excited by the enthusiasm of my students – most of them. One girl, who was working on her own because we have an odd number of students, was clearly getting frustrated and angry at the difficulties she was having. Even though other students and I helped her, she kept falling more and more behind. I was pretty confident she would be going home and letting her parents know in no uncertain terms that I had helped to foster in her a strong dislike of programming.
To calm her down, I reminded her that it was okay if her program didn’t do everything that was on the tutorial, and that she might want to take a break for a few minutes until I could help her.
We talk a lot about Growth Mindset in my class, and she apparently felt like “take a break” meant “give up.” Instead of heeding my advice, she doggedly worked through the lines of program. When I was about to go help her, she exclaimed, “I figured it out!” Then she excitedly described how she had added her own rules to make something even more fun happen at the end.
On the way back to class, this same girl who made it quite clear for the majority of the class that she would be more than happy to lob a few pizzas and hamburgers at me, declared, “I LOVED Hour of Code!” as she skipped down the hall.
Every day that I teach, I learn way more from my students than they do from me.
One day someone is going to figure this out and ask for a refund of my salary…
In the meantime, check out some video I took of some of the games the students made below. And, if you want more ideas for teaching students how to code, here is a link to my Programming for Kids Pinterest Board.
Full disclosure: this first week of December is going to be my busiest week this year. Therefore, I decided to cheat a bit for a few days and recycle some posts from last year. I’ve done a bit of editing to make sure they remain current but otherwise they are the same. Hopefully you still find them useful!
Let’s face it. This month is hard. No one – including you – is feeling very focused on academics right now. To save everyone’s sanity, and to put smiles on all of the faces in the room, try some of these creative ideas:
If your students are participating in an Hour of Code next week by doing the Hopscotch tutorials on the iPad, use this extension suggested by @kd0602 – design a Holiday Scene. It’s similar to the idea of making a holiday card in Scratch. However, since Hopscotch offers less commands to use, a bit more creative problem solving is required (such as using the text object to make the letter “o” stand in for eyes and a nose on a snowman).
Assign students to change the words of a famous holiday song (such as Jingle Bells) to reflect a character’s perspective in a book you are currently reading.
Create holiday cards in the manner of a famous artist. What would a Picasso card look like? How about Van Gogh or O’Keefe?
Let’s face it. This week is hard. No one – including you – is feeling very focused on academics right now. To save everyone’s sanity, and to put smiles on all of the faces in the room, try some of these creative ideas:
If your students participated in an Hour of Code last week by doing the Hopscotch tutorial on the iPad, use this extension suggested by @kd0602 – design a Holiday Scene. It’s similar to the idea of making a holiday card in Scratch. However, since Hopscotch offers less commands to use, a bit more creative problem solving is required (such as using the text object to make the letter “o” stand in for eyes and a nose on a snowman).
Assign students to change the words of a famous holiday song (such as Jingle Bells) to reflect a character’s perspective in a book you are currently reading.
Create holiday cards in the manner of a famous artist. What would a Picasso card look like? How about Van Gogh or O’Keefe?
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 many of us, at least in the United States, another school year is over. Even as we eagerly embark on our rejuvenation journeys for the summer, you might be thinking, as I am, of new ideas for the next school year. This week, I would like to share some of the improvements I hope to make in my classroom for the 2013-2014 school year. Today’s post is about the benefits of teaching programming to our students.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you have probably noticed that I am a huge advocate for teaching programming to kids. You can see this trend building in a lot of the education blogs and professional publications. Like all trends, it needs to be done right so that it will not be a colossal failure or a “flash in the pan.” Here is why it should be done, and how I plan on doing it next year in my classroom.
Why We Should Teach Programming to Kids
I think that there is a misconception that this is all about teaching kids a new “language” that is useful in the career market. While that is, perhaps, one of the benefits, I think that it should not be the main purpose. Programming languages evolve quickly, and teaching a specific one might be likened to teaching Latin. It can help you to decode other languages, but it is unlikely you will use it daily.
I learned Basic when I was in high school. I haven’t used it since. But I still remember some very important lessons that I learned in that class that can be extrapolated for real life.
The most important lesson was that, if you are not getting the results you want, you can’t keep doing the same thing. I remember the first couple of times a program did not work the way I wanted it to, and I kept saying to the computer, “That’s not what you’re supposed to be doing.”
Once I realized that I only had myself to blame, I would set about finding out what I had done wrong. This led to the next life lesson – find the real source of the problem or your “fix” will make things worse. Sometimes I had to dig deep into the code to figure it out, but would not realize that until I had tried one or two simple revisions that would end in disaster.
When programming, you also advance through the Scientific Process, and learn to change one variable at a time if your conclusion is not what you expected.
And finally, programming is not all about logic. Once you understand the code, you can use your imagination to create unusual, unique, and even beautiful programs.
What I Plan to Do Next Year
As some of my colleagues pointed out this year, Programming falls very easily into something that we already have in our curriculum for elementary gifted students – Systems Thinking. Now that I am becoming familiar with Tynker through the online summer class I’m offering, I plan to use Tynker with my 3rd graders during our Systems Thinking unit. If you want to start anywhere with programming (from about 7 or 8 years old and up), I would highly recommend Tynker as you can create classes and monitor student progress very easily. Plus, it has an engaging curriculum of projects.
I want to weave programming throughout my K-5 gifted classes, so I will begin my Kinders with the iPad app Daisy the Dinosaur. For 1st, we will move on to Kodable, and for second, Hopscotch. (I may switch these last 2 around – I need to play with them more to determine difficulty levels.)
3rd grade, as I mentioned, will do Tynker. 4th grade will work on Cargo-Bot. And, 5th grade will work with Gamestar Mechanic (which is web-based).
If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment. Also, for even more links for Programming for Kids, feel free to visit my Pinterest board on this topic.
