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Hour of Code | pad patter 12.4.18

keepscrappin

keepscrappin

ScrapWithTheWind
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I recently started teaching computers at our elementary school and part of my job is to teach kids K-6 to code. It might sound scary, but coding now-a-days is actually pretty easy and a lot of fun! Anyone can code, from young children to us old folks.

What is the Hour of Code?
The Hour of Code started as a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify "code", to show that anybody can learn the basics, and to broaden participation in the field of computer science. It has since become a worldwide effort to celebrate computer science, starting with 1-hour coding activities but expanding to all sorts of community efforts. Check out the tutorials and activities. This grassroots campaign is supported by over 400 partners and 200,000 educators worldwide.

When is the Hour of Code?
The Hour of Code takes place each year during Computer Science Education Week. The 2018 Computer Science Education Week will be December 3-9, but you can host an Hour of Code all year-round. Computer Science Education Week is held annually in recognition of the birthday of computing pioneer Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906).


https://hourofcode.com/us/learn

Yesterday, I had my grades 3-6 students do the new Dance Party Hour of Code. It was so much fun and everyone had a blast! Even the students who normally struggle in the computer lab, loved it! Most of the hour of code activities don't even take an hour to complete. I only get the kids for 45 minutes and most of them completed it in 30-35 minutes and moved on to another Hour of code activity. I can't wait for Wednesday and Thursday so I can do Hour of Code with the rest of my students.

So the point to all of this is, that I want to share a fun activity with all ya'll and see who likes to try new things. Give it a try and see how fun coding can be. You could even have your kids try it too and see if you do better than they do... hehe!
 
I think this is awesome, Kayla!! My 14 year old grandson is quite the coder. He's even designed some games. I actually know HTML, but I understand that there's even a newer version of that. Just to stimulate my brain, I decided, awhile back to go back and at least read HTML. What code(s) are you teaching the kids? Is HTML really outdated now?
 
Cherylndesigns said:
I think this is awesome, Kayla!! My 14 year old grandson is quite the coder. He's even designed some games. I actually know HTML, but I understand that there's even a newer version of that. Just to stimulate my brain, I decided, awhile back to go back and at least read HTML. What code(s) are you teaching the kids? Is HTML really outdated now?
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That is so cool that you know HTML! I bet your grandson would like doing the Dance Party Hour of Code. All the kids loved the fun music choices. I had kids singing and dancing in the lab! It was so much fun!

I teach the block-based coding. If you click on the show code button. It shows the javaScript. And says this: Even top universities teach block-based coding (e.g., Berkeley, Harvard). But under the hood, the blocks you have assembled can also be shown in JavaScript, the world's most widely used coding language.
 
Cheryl, I'm learning html5, and JavaScript in college right now. So, html isn't too outdated!

Do you use studio.code.org Kayla? @keepscrappin I put munchkin on it at least once a week to learn. He also likes to learn my JavaScript assignments, but they have gotten a little complicated for him lately.
 
bestcee said:
Cheryl, I'm learning html5, and JavaScript in college right now. So, html isn't too outdated!

Do you use studio.code.org Kayla? @keepscrappin I put munchkin on it at least once a week to learn. He also likes to learn my JavaScript assignments, but they have gotten a little complicated for him lately.
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Most of the coding I've taught is with Scratch and Scratch Jr. I use scratch.mit.edu for grades 3-6 and I use Scratch Jr on the ipads for K-2. There are free lessons on https://bootuppd.org/ so I've been teaching those. I have used code.org for the Hour of Code activities to give the kids a break from our Scratch coding projects. I also used google's Santa tracker for some of the younger kids yesterday and they loved it.
 
bestcee said:
Cheryl, I'm learning html5, and JavaScript in college right now. So, html isn't too outdated!

Do you use studio.code.org Kayla? @keepscrappin I put munchkin on it at least once a week to learn. He also likes to learn my JavaScript assignments, but they have gotten a little complicated for him lately.
Click to expand...
That's good to hear, Courtney. HTML5 has a lot of updates/changes from HTML. I kind of gave up trying to re-learn something the same/but different. I may give it another go. I was part of a 3 woman team who ran a scrapbook DT blog and we did everything in HTML. It was so much easier than trying to write things the other way. I still resort to that if I can't get something to do what I want it to do. The Ning platform is really "picky" and I used to use code on that quite a lot, when I was an admin. I think I'll tackle JavaScript now.
 
This is super fun! I seriously need to check in to it a bit and see if it's something I can do with my students.
 
I took a web design class back in high school then as part of one of my final year papers at university.

The university I went to had us take two general education papers outside of the faculty I was studying in. Due to timetabling and most of the courses being on a different campus I did mine during summer school in Jan and Feb (now you know why I never did MOC!). For my first paper I did a sociology paper (there was one in my degree but it was classed as a social work paper in the education faculty and the general education paper was classed as a sociology paper in the arts faculty). My second paper was a computer science paper where I knew probably 30% going in so while it was a challenge it wasn’t too bad.
 
I loved to code even as a kid. One of my favorite classes in college was a computer programming class too, but I really don't use it for my job much. With our old CAD package it had the ability to write short programs to do repeated tasks and I loved doing those to make my job easier and then people would see me using them and want to use them too. I also kinda use programming to do actions in Photoshop too... so coding or programming is SO useful all over the place once you get past to "it's too hard" or "I don't know how" feelings. I'm going to check into these with my boys! I think they'd love it!
 
My BS is in Computer science and I worked in IT for just over 20 years. However I have been home for over 16 years. I think I'm retired, although I do use the show source option on here if things don't look right. If I had more of a need for it I could learn new tech.
 
keepscrappin said:
Yesterday, I had my grades 3-6 students do the new Dance Party Hour of Code. It was so much fun and everyone had a blast! Even the students who normally struggle in the computer lab, loved it!
Click to expand...

My 4th grader did it at school this week too, and she said her class loved it.
 
This is great! Coding is something this next generation will need to know :) I've dabbled in a bit of coding (easy coding) when I started my blog, but it's gotten a heck of a lot easier in the last 5-6 years.
 
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