The new year is off to a terrific start in the Sinclair STEM Lab! It has been wonderful to reconnect with all the returning students and to get to know those who are new to Sinclair. The first round each year is largely focused on computer programming. This is to refresh the memories of the returning students and to introduce coding to students who have not previously had the opportunity. I teach programming in order to give the students another tool that they can use to express their ideas and share their learning.
Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades
The primary grades begin the year in Code.org courses. They learn to use Blockly, a programming language in which the commands are represented as blocks that the students arrange to create programs. The programs they write are to solve a variety of puzzles, many of them like mazes, by giving directions to an on screen character. Throughout the course the students are introduced to several programming concepts including loops, events, and algorithmic thinking. The puzzles increase in complexity as the students progress through the lessons. Some of the lessons let students practice coding skills without a computer and we call these "unplugged" activities. I have been using Code.org courses since the founding of the STEM lab 9 years ago and have found the structured programming tasks give students an excellent foundation for the creative, open ended projects they will create in Scratch and Scratch Jr.
On Fridays the classes participated in a building challenge meant to give them a chance to stretch their creativity. First we read the book What Do You Do With an Idea which I really like for its focus on creative confidence and wonderful illustrations. The challenge this round was, "Build something that helps people", and the material to be used was Legos. I encouraged the students to think as creatively as they wanted about what it meant to help people and then gave them about 20 minutes to work. As always, I was deeply impressed by the solutions they built.
3rd, 4th, and 5th grades
The upper grade classes returned to the Scratch programming language this round. For 3rd grade, this was also their introduction to the online Scratch platform where they are able to share projects, turn them in to the class studios, and give and receive feedback from me and their peers. Each grade created projects focused on a different programming concept. Third grade worked on parallelism, multiple outputs occurring at the same time. Fourth grade learned to use the broadcast commands to control their programs, while 5th grade created projects with lists that store multiple pieces of information for use in the program. Each group started by exploring projects related to the theme in an inspiration studio to gain an understanding of how the programming concept works and to spark ideas for their own projects. We discussed the importance of commenting one's code and reviewed good digital citizenship practices. The fantastic final projects can be found in the grade level studios linked below.
The implementation of my National Geographic Fellowship to the Arctic is a work in progress, but you can read my post journey reflections here.
