Today may have been the last virtual library code club. The librarian and I are planning an in-person meeting for next month, outside under their tent where we will do some Makey-Makey Scratch coding. Then in the fall we will try for in-person in the library coding. It looks like we’ve made it through.
After the winter of monthly projects themed around Code Club’s protecting the planet, I changed the topic to space related projects. I found it worked better to keep one studio over a couple of months with more projects in them than have a different studio per meeting.
The virtual sessions never had more than 5 kids per meeting. Most kids came back a couple of times in a row. New students from my school code club started coming in the Spring.
In the Spring I was inspired by the landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance and side-kick helicopter Ingenuity that our first off-world project was to explore Mars like NASA’s Ingenuity, the first helicopter on another planet. So we tried to “Create a video game that lets players explore the Red Planet with a helicopter like the one on Mars with NASA’s Perseverance rover! Use Scratch, a visual programming language and think like NASA space-mission planners to design your game!”
We used the starter project Mars helicopter starter in our Off Planet studio.
And the online instructions: JPL Code a Mars Helicopter Video Game. For fun I suggested they use the text-to-voice extension blocks to have the helicopter announce Mission Success.
Then we created a side-scrolling moon vehicle project using the project starter Moon Buggy from the Moon Hack 2019 guide. This one was difficult to complete in the time and virtually.
The last virtual session we tried using the video sensing blocks to create a space project. I put some sample video sensing projects in our Off Planet studio and suggested we test these and then change the theme to make a space version.
This seemed to work well but some of the student’s technology had trouble getting the video sensing to work. I know they all had cameras because – they were on a video call with me but maybe that maxed their device or the permissions for using the video camera in Scratch weren’t set.
I must remind myself that simple projects that have a lot of room for creativity work the best. It’s always about the low floor and wide walls, whether in-person or virtual.
My Code Club Journal 