Last week, I encouraged you to participate in this year’s Hour of Code. I know that guiding a classroom of students through an hour of programming can sound intimidating, particularly if you aren’t experienced in it yourself. The secret is to do as I have – admit to yourself that you know nothing and your students … Read more
It’s not too early to start planning for this year’s Hour of Code! It’s December 8-14, and you know that November is going to fly by quickly. Hour of Code is an initiative from Code.org with the purpose of getting students around the world exposed to programming skills. All of my GT students, 1st through … Read more
On this blog, I tend to post about a lot of ideas that I find, and some readers don’t always get a chance to know if I ever tried them – or if they were complete flops. This week, I want to feature a few past ideas that I did try and that were successful … Read more
For today’s Gifts for the Gifted post, I wanted to keep with the Hour of Code theme for this week. Unfortunately, this particular product may or not be available for purchase in the near future. If you are interested in obtaining it, I recommend visiting the website to let the company know. Because I have … Read more
Have you done your Hour of Code, yet? So far, I’ve done 8.5 hours of coding this week with my students in various grade levels – with more hours to add today and tomorrow! We’ve used Scratch, Hopscotch, and a board game called Robot Turtles (which I will be describing in detail in tomorrow’s post). For more ideas for Programming for … Read more
Well, I finally did it. With the help of: an Hour of Code Tutorial, a 3rd grader who knows what he’s doing, and what I learned from auditing a class that my daughter took, I finally felt somewhat ready to try Scratch, the free M.I.T. programming language available on the web, with my 3rd grade … Read more