My Students Completed 20 Hours of Code-What Now?
Last week, our MS participated in "Hour of Code" through code academy. In the middle school, this happened in science class on Monday and Tuesday. Through the teacher dashboard, I created a class which gave me an access code that I could email to students and set up tasks for them to do. I assigned the "20 hour Intro to Computer Science Course" and it was scary on how fast some of them breezed through it.
Now What?
After our hour of code, a number of students continued with their intro to computer science course in their free-time which is basic block building, Scratch-like foundations for Javascript. Formative assessments from lessons later on that week indicated that some students had a great handle on some of our content understandings so I encouraged these individuals to try to and use coding to illustrate basic vocabulary terms that we've been learning about as differentiated extension activities.
Those who had made the most progress on Code Academy had developed enough skills to make quick animations of this vocabulary which I was able to put on our website as supporting resources for others. See some examples here and here. From my gallery below, it's obvious that coding has obvious connections for mathematics-specifically, geometry, angle studies, symmetry, and the coordinate plane.
My big take away this week was when a student asked me what the app should do, to which I said: "You tell it what to do. You're in charge, and you have the freedom to be as creative as you want. Remix something you've seen, or create something no one has seen before!"
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| After creating tutorials for my students to do, I can see track their progress. |
Now What?
After our hour of code, a number of students continued with their intro to computer science course in their free-time which is basic block building, Scratch-like foundations for Javascript. Formative assessments from lessons later on that week indicated that some students had a great handle on some of our content understandings so I encouraged these individuals to try to and use coding to illustrate basic vocabulary terms that we've been learning about as differentiated extension activities.
Those who had made the most progress on Code Academy had developed enough skills to make quick animations of this vocabulary which I was able to put on our website as supporting resources for others. See some examples here and here. From my gallery below, it's obvious that coding has obvious connections for mathematics-specifically, geometry, angle studies, symmetry, and the coordinate plane.
My big take away this week was when a student asked me what the app should do, to which I said: "You tell it what to do. You're in charge, and you have the freedom to be as creative as you want. Remix something you've seen, or create something no one has seen before!"
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| The progress dashboard. After a number of tutorials, the "make an app" button appears. |
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