Alas... this is not how I had hoped the year would start. The STEM Lab has been relegated to a cart for the foreseeable future. That puts some serious constraints on the kinds of projects we are able to do. However, we will not let the cart life keep us ,down and the year is off to a fantastic start with lots of creative coding projects across the grade levels.
Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd Grades
As usual, the primary grades started with Code.org activities this year. I have found that this is an excellent way to refresh the memories of returning students, and the best introduction to computer programming for students who are new to Sinclair. Over the course of the week students work on various coding puzzles in the online courses, as well as complete some unplugged activities, to develop their algorithmic thinking skills. In normal times Friday is usually reserved for a building challenge, but as that would require moving a whole bunch of stuff, I have changed that to a Scratch Jr coding challenge for the time being. I read the students a book and then presented them with an open-ended prompt. While Code.org serves to teach the students particular programming skills, Scratch Jr allows them to explore the creative possibilities of computer coding.
3rd Grade
At the end of 2nd grade I begin to transition the students from Scratch Jr, which is designed for emerging readers, to the full version of Scratch. At that time they worked in the offline version so that I could be certain that they stayed focused on the tasks at hand rather than getting lost in the wonderland that is the Scratch online community. At the start of third grade the students are introduced to the online version of Scratch. They log into their accounts, learn how to share projects with appropriate documentation, and they practice giving meaningful project feedback to their peers. The week's project centers on the concept of "parallelism" which is when multiple things are happening at the same time in a program. It is a simple prompt that is completely open-ended so students have a chance to be highly creative. You can check out the project studio here.
4th and 5th Grades
This past June I attended an online workshop hosted by Chris Lovell, a brilliant computer science teacher in the UK. Mr. Lovell's specialty is creating retro games and student guides for the BBC micro:bit microcontroller. In the workshop we were guided through the process of coding these games and playing them on the micro:bit. I was honestly a bit shocked to see how easily such games could be created and knew that I wanted to try these with the students this year. I introduce our students to the micro:bit in 3rd grade, so the majority of this year's 4th and 5th graders are familiar with it.
As expected, the students were super excited about this unit. The student coding guides Mr. Lovell has created are so accessible that even students who are new to Sinclair, and have little to no prior coding experience, have had no trouble getting started. First we made a game together, code-a-long style. When that was complete according to the game guide, I challenged the students to customize their game. They came up with with several amazing additions: increased difficulty , more obstacles, faster enemies, sound effects, game over music, and more. For the last part of the week students chose another game to create and customize from among the other guides. I really loved seeing them all start from the same place and end up with such different final products.
The guides so generously shared by Mr. Lovell can be found here.
