CSP 22-23 Year in Review

I just finished my first year teaching Computer Science Principles at my local high school and it’s time to reflect on the year and celebrate some of the outstanding projects made by my students. It was my first official year of teaching CSP and high school students. I had a group of 15 mostly seniors with a couple 10th & 11th graders. Eleven students took the AP CSP exam in May.

I used code.org’s CSP 22-23 curriculum, which I enjoyed. I was fairly true to the course, only augmenting here and there. I was pleased with it overall but I have some ideas for next year. I want the students to make more coding projects – especially before they start the AP CSP performance task. I could have been more prepared myself for PT expectations and have better prepared my students for it. This summer I will be taking more code.org professional development to dive deeper into CSP. I’m excited for cs teacher summer camp.

Early in the curriculum, the students learn about digital data and binary. I had them create bitmaps in Google Sheets. I’d like to do more next year. I have an addressable RGB matrix from Ada Fruit I’d like to set up for this unit.

First project: The students’ first project in code.org’s App Lab is in unit three. My students worked on a project in pairs and played with designing screens, adding and naming elements, and doing the coding of onEvents. App Lab’s IDE makes it pretty easy to get started with Javascript – being both text and block-based coding and having a full design toolbox. Here are two memorable first projects:

The next unit was on variables, conditionals, and functions. Most of the parts you need to make a decision-maker app. One of the key takeaways was to make an updateScreen function to call when onEvents happened. The updateScreen function would check all the conditions and display the results. It could be called from any button. I liked the EIPM setup of the unit. Lessons were ordered in Explore, Investigate, Practice, and Make to learn the concepts. Students worked in different pairs or individually for the final Make project. Here are two fine examples of their decision-maker apps.

I also started requiring comments. I think I’ll refine the comment requirements for the next round with a title, purpose, and author at the top. I did have some good commenters:

Unit 5 – List Loops and Traversals. This is where the rubber meets the road. For new-to-coding students, lists with indexes are a lot to take in. Loops can make sense, but then algorithms to work with data and very big lists can be daunting. The unit project is big and at the end, we’d had enough coding for the moment, which is unfortunate, because we could have used one more project before the AP Performance task began. Here are a couple of outstanding Hackathon projects:

After the Hackathon was the end of the first semester. Some students only take the first semester of CSP, the rest stay on to prepare for the AP test. One student who was going to take the full course bowed out at the end of the semester saying coding wasn’t for him. Another decided to stay – say coding was definitely for him and he is planning to major in Computer Science now. For the midterm, I wrote some review questions from Units 1-5 and had the students pick one project to improve.

In the Google form for the midterm, I forgot to collect any personal identifying information 🤣. I could mostly tell who’s test was who’s from the short answer questions, but I had to go back to the students to be sure I gave the right grade to the correct person. Here are a couple of improved App Lab projects:

Unit 6 was a very short unit on algorithms. It was a dry topic for them even though there were plenty of unplugged activities and online simulations to enhance the unit. I need to do better with it next year. I think it would balance nicely with creating a game in App Lab. Fortunately, I found out about Gimkit last summer. Students really enjoyed using Gimkit to study vocabulary. It didn’t seem to matter what game they played.

The last unit before the AP CSP Performance task is Unit 7 where we learn about functions with parameters and returns while creating libraries. I feel I could have done a better job on this unit and that would have prepared them better for the PT. Their functions turned out okay but most were not complex enough to meet the PT expectations. The concepts of a function as a black box, scope (the notion of global versus local variables), and how to deal with returns was lost on a few. The project guide had questions that were similar to the questions that were going to be on the AP Performance task – a nice preview of what was to come that I could grade and give them feedback on. I think I will need to figure out a way to improve my teaching of this unit. Here are a few example functions made by my students:

As a teacher, I felt Unit 8 was the hardest to orchestrate. I went over the AP performance task rules, examples, and planning guide. Then I had to be hands-off while I gave them three weeks of class time to complete the task. So much independent class time. It was hard not to answer their questions and only “keep them on task”. After all that class time, I still had three students not complete and turn in the PT task until days before it was due. I have to figure out a better plan for managing this unit – perhaps grading them for staying within the outlined time frame. I can’t post any of their projects yet as the AP CSP scores won’t be released until next month. I have my own unshared “scoring” of their PT tasks and will compare my expectations to their scores when the results come out.

Unit 9 was about data visualization and interpretation. I think this was a fairly easy unit for most of my students because a number of them have taken AP science or math courses, which would cover this. I also knew that we were going to do an extra unit on machine learning after the AP test which would address data bias even more. Their projects met all of the expectations but none of them were exemplars.

By Unit 10 we needed another App Lab project to create. I remember seeing the presentations of Unit 10 projects from the previous year and I remembered I was underwhelmed. It seemed quite a bit of time was spent not coding but looking at innovations and global impacts. Those are important topics but the end result didn’t justify the time invested. So I set a different end-of-unit project. I still made sure that they completed all of the relevant lessons on cybersecurity, innovation, and global impact, but I gave them the task of creating a clicker or other animation game.

This time I got some stellar projects from my students. It also helped relieve some of the monotony of taking the full-length MCQ practice tests I was simultaneously assigning as we prepped for the AP test. Here are some good examples:

Here are some great examples: Invisible Maze where you have to find the hidden walls to navigate to the trophy. Donut Clicker – so many levels, such great detail, and a Doodle Jump remake from an amazing coder (and future CS major).

And here is a legendary example: Castle Clicker will go down as a mega game that almost caused this future CS major to fail a class (different from mine) because he spent all his time on this game – in that other class and basically his whole available time for the two weeks. Here were my comments to this student about his project:

There are so many layers to this game. He definitely went beyond the expectations I had set for this project. He is a gamer and now wants to be a CS major.

The students felt prepared for the AP test and came back saying they have plenty of time to complete all of the MCQs. AP results come out in July. I’m only concerned about a few students.

After the AP test, we had about four weeks of class before the end of the school year. That reflection will need to be another blog post.

It feels good to put my reflections down in a blog post again.

Make your Heart Grow with Scratch Jr

I like to use February to promote kindness so I had my first-grade classes create Be Kind projects in Scratch Jr as a final project. I used this project to teach the send and receive messages blocks.

The first graders started in Seesaw with a video about being kind online and a music video from Sesame Street about Kindness and then a group discussion and a Kind Kids drawing prompt from Tracy Piltz on Seesaw (I may have played the music video a few more times as well). The next time we met we reflected on our kindness drawing and started creating an animated version in PBS Scratch Jr.

I reminded them that they could draw their own background. After creating or adding the background they needed two Sprite characters – I generally encouraged using people showing kindness to each other but being kind to animals is also good.

Kindness projects by 1st graders

A lot of them wanted to animate asking questions like “Do you want to be friends?” or “Do you want to play?” and then having a response so I showed them the “send a message” code block and the reciprocal “receive a message” block for the response. They did a pretty good job of coding those up.

I made sure to have enough time to share their projects after adding a title and naming their project. I encourage good naming habits. ScratchJr defaults to a Project # which I try to compare to having a library full of books titled Book #.

I’m thinking of making them into an animated movie to share with the school community but it is time-consuming to record all of the projects on the iPad and compile them.

I was having so much fun with this kindness project that I had Kindergarteners make Valentine’s Day animations – or Be Mine projects. In my K classes, I introduced (again?) Scratch Jr.’s drawing and editing tools to draw hearts. They struggled a bit with the order of choosing the drawing tool, drawing then switching to the fill bucket then back to the drawing tool but it was a good exercise.

After making the hearts we added a character to receive them. Then we used the blue code blocks to animated our valentines. I introduced the pink “grow” block to add growing to the movement of their Valentine hearts. It was so fun to say over and over “make your heart grow” to the little 5-year-olds. It was a bucket-filler for me and the kids had a great time – after some initial frustration learning new stuff. Some of them even experiemented with other pink blocks like “shrink” and “hide”. We didn’t have time to share the projects but their teachers came around and saw them.

K example Valentine animation

Choose Your Adventure with Scratch Jr

I’m enjoying teaching Scratch Jr during the 1st-grade classes’ weekly tech time. I still have my go-to Scratch Jr projects that I’ve blogged about but I’ve tried some new things out so far this year that I have enjoyed.

I like to fit my projects into the 1st-grade curriculum so when the teachers told me they were working on defining characters of a story, we used PBS Scratch Jr to create our own characters and animate them. When they started learning about the setting of a story, I had the students create a Choose Your Adventure (CYA) project.

1st grade CYA projects that were shared to my iPad

This was such a great project that I did this with all four 1st grade classes and we took the time to share the projects. (Re: -sharing: I have the students (with some help) Airdrop their projects to my iPad. My iPad is “mirroring” onto the classroom projector board. I get their “presents” and run their program for everyone to watch and enjoy. I ask the author to tell me which choice to make first)

In terms of coding, the Choose Your Adventure project introduced the “Start on Tap” and “Change Page” blocks for my 1st graders. I start the lesson by introducing what a choose-your-own-adventure style book is and talk about letting the player get to make a choice between two places to go. We then pick a starting background and choose two more adventure place backgrounds – now they have 3 pages.

Example character code

Next, they choose two characters for the first page. These are the characters the adventurers tap on to make the CYA adventure. The coding of these characters starts with two blocks – the gold “start on tap” followed by the red “change to page #”. Once they have the first page set up with navigation, I send them to those other pages to independently create the coding for the animated adventures. While they are creating characters and coding on those pages, I can circulate and help students. I generally ask them to test the program when I stop by their desk to see how it’s going.

Depending on the time, we can stop there and finish up on a second meeting. Otherwise, I have them go back to the introductory page again and add a title, like CYA, and some more code to the characters to let the player read the choices. These blocks are “start on the green flag” and “say”. The iPad keyboard has a text-to-speech button for the students to say the words if they don’t know how to spell them. (A super iPad feature for K and 1st grade). Other students may want to record their voice announcing the adventure choices.

Once their projects are tested they save them as CYA – I tell them that saving their projects as Project 3 is like having all the books in the library listed by number. “I want to read book 35 today.” And that generally gets them to rename their project.

I was really happy with the quality of coding and understanding of going to different pages. Some of them added “start on tap” to other pages to continue the adventure.

Other projects that 1st graders did this fall were Spooky Forest and Sunrise, Sunset from ScratchJr Curriculum activities. I’m planning to introduce Meet and Greet this year as well.

Last Fall’s 1st grade “Spooky Forest” and “Sun and Moon” projects

Next up is my own Be Kind project – with a tie-in to Digital Citizenship and February’s Be Kind online.

“Be Kind” projects from last year

More Scratch Jr projects

I’ve been teaching more Scratch Jr sessions for 1st graders this year already. In addition to the projects I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve enjoyed the more creative, interactive storytelling the students have been making in Scratch Jr.

Shape character

I challenged the students to make an animated scene using their own artwork. And I challenged them to make their art using the shape tools only. And they rose to the challenge and created great scenes using (mostly) all shapes and all of their own drawing.

Scratch Jr Shapes projects

The next skill I wanted to introduce was transition from one scene to the next. I do a robotics project with 1st graders each year where the students design a robot to solve a problem – like cleaning their room, filling their water bottle, brushing their hair, going to the jungle, etc. Then they build the robot with Legos on a meeperBot base. Once built, we have a helperbot melee, driving the robots around the classroom. Super fun. So I thought to combine the robot design with a Scratch Jr project. Scene one where they state the problem they need a robot to help with. Next a scene with their robot design. And a final scene with the robot accomplishing the task.

My grocery-getter helperbot in Scratch Jr.

They did the brainstorming and drawing of their robot character in Scratch on one day. The project was fun and the students were being super creative with robots going to space, doing their math homework, cleaning their hamster cage or brushing their teeth. Then it got interrupted and delayed. In the end when we got back to it, we ended up building and driving the robots all in one day and moved on. We did not get to go back to finish or share the Scratch Jr projects.

I’m hoping the K & 1st-grade students will do more storytelling with Scratch Jr. during the coming months. My goto teaching project list now includes:

1. Intro Animation
2. Speed race
3. My Family
4. Meet and Greet
5. Repeat
6. Shapeland
7. My Robot

12th Code Club Starts

I started my 12th session of 4th-grade Code Club last week.  Just like last year, we are going to start off with Snack Discussion. During this first meeting I went over my expectations, rules, and plans for our future meetings:

Meeting #	Meeting topic outline
1	First meeting – Rules & goals, intro to Scratch
2	Ist learning project
3	2nd learning project
4	3rd learning project
5	4th learning project, begin designing your own project
6	Design review
7	Begin individual/pair project
8	Continue work on individual projects
9	Finish work on projects
10	Showcase of projects – Parents invited!

Then I asked them what their goals for Code Club were.  What did they want to learn – because I can present lessons that help them meet their goals.

What my Code Club wants to learn to make with Scratch

For some, they just want to learn to make Sprites move around using the arrow keys. Others want to make something like a Fortnite or Surviv.io Battle Royale game.  I told them I wouldn’t allow any first-person shooters and I have a general ban on weapons (although I have made the occasional exception for a toilet paper cannon, and a laser gun for shooting blobs).  My 7th-grade helper helped me out by describing the work it would take to “code” the whole landscape of Surviv.io Battle Royale and generally expressing his opinion that it would take too much work to do something of that scale.

I have two former Code Club members as helpers in this session.  I sent out an email last month to the Tech Integrator and other STEM teachers at the high school looking for a possible high school volunteer for Code Club. When I didn’t hear anything, I sent some emails to my first Code Club parents.  Those students are now 9th graders, but I heard back that they are busy.  One younger brother (my 7th-grade helper I mentioned above) was willing to help out. Yay. He arrived (he is really tall now) and asked if it was the same format as when he was in Code Club.  Yep.  I haven’t changed much of the format.  He agreed that it worked as he enjoyed making his own project during the second half of the session.  A fifth-grader and Code Club member from last year also showed up to help.  Once I confirmed with one of his parents that he was allowed to stay, I had two helpers.

I usually start with a maze project or Chatbot.  I decided to start with a Chatbot.  I use Code Club world project directions and I like the first project to be an easy one so they can get used to the direction format. Whenever someone needed help, I’d make sure they had at least looked at the directions.

Other times when someone needed help, I’d have to encourage my helpers to jump in.  I think they had a good time and were helpful.  I heard them complain once about the coders not saving.  “You should save! Often.” I heard the 7th grader say.  I think the students were deleting the whole Sprite when they wanted to make a costume change rather than changing costumes from the costume tab.  I think I’m going to talk about the Sprites and their properties (and saving) next time.

I’m also going to introduce Space Junk as a learning project. It will meet their goals of learning to use arrow keys and the obstacle avoidance games. We are off to a good start.

Music and Art Projects

My 11th 4th-grade Code Club Showcase is coming up this week. Eleven of 13 projects are ready to go. The last two are showing good progress, so I’m not too worried. I’m seeing the usual variety of virtual pets, flappy bird, pong, quizzes, soccer, chatbot projects, etc. (and yay, no “try not to laugh” games). This current group of projects represents a lot of creativity and effort and we are going to have a great Showcase. There are also two unusual projects that I haven’t seen before.  One is a music quiz and the other a color-by-number game.

The music quiz is very creative and I love it.  This student created his own music and asks the user to identify his songs by name. You can practice by listening to the music he has created before you take the quiz.

Click the buttons to preview the music before taking the quiz.

I imagined he would code the music with the Scratch music blocks, or want to bootleg popular songs.  Instead, he used Chrome Music Lab’s Song Maker to write his own songs.  I had been experimenting with Chrome Music Lab earlier this year and was excited to see that this was his app of choice to create music.

Chrome Music Lab’s Song Maker example

The biggest problem we ran into was there is no way to save or record directly from Song Maker. I researched some other ways to record sounds from a website but the simplest we found was to plug in our microphone, start recording in Scratch and then hit the playback button from Song Maker. We made a few poor recordings from the low-quality computer speakers and noisy room and I wasn’t sure he was going to be happy with the results or that it would even be enjoyable to listen to and take his quiz.

Mr. Songs Alot project

For the final song recording, I let him record in the quieter room adjacent to the computer lab.  It turned out pretty well.  He even gave it a cool name: Mr. Songs Alot.  I hope he gets some good feedback and more students decide to try a game like this.

The other unique project was the Color-by-Number project. I’ve had students create a painting game with the Paint Box project, but not a paint-by-number type project.  I let them work on it a while but it became clear they had no idea how to code it to make the paint appear. So I went looking and I found an example of a paint-by-number project on Scratch that they could examine and learn how someone else coded it.  This is a great way to learn new techniques and algorithms in computer programming.  Software writers are great at this-trying to solve their own problems by looking at someone else’s examples- it is kind of why/how Stack Overflow came to exist.

Paint by number project

Even after they looked at it, I don’t think they understood that they had to create themselves the illusion using different Sprite costumes to make the color fill in (or they just forgot from one week to the next).

The “magic” of the paint by number is 2 different costumes for the coloring illusion.

The example had 2 costumes for each different color. One with color and one with the number in it.  When you dragged the paint bucket over the Sprite and clicked, the Sprite went from the number on it to the colored one and the paint bucket goes from filled to empty.    One team member was making the “coloring page” and the other coding the paint buckets. The “coloring page” maker kept making the pages on the Stage while I kept reminding them about the example I gave them.

I worked with the paint bucket coder and we tweaked some of his code so that it is a good project even if it is only one picture to color.

We had some issues with paint buckets when they start on top of the Sprite they were going to color and instantly coloring them in when the green flag is clicked. Also, keeping the “coloring page” Sprites on the visual layer under the buckets was tricky.  I couldn’t find the Scratch 2.0 option to make a Sprite not draggable by the user.  I might have to explore this type of project to see if I can make it into a learning project for one of my groups.

The showcase is tomorrow!!!

Update:  I found out that Song Maker has added a save feature so we can now download a wav file and import into Scratch. This is great.

LMS Winter Carnival

Last week I ran two coding sessions at the middle school for their Winter Carnival.  There are a wide variety of activities offered for the 5th- to 8th-grade students during the morning, divided into two 1.5 hours sessions. Options ranged from skiing, dancing, and ping-pong, to cookie decorating, tic-tac-toe, and D&D.  I was invited to offer Scratch coding.

Winter Carnival Project Studio

My activity, Coding/Scratch, had this description: “Students will have the option to create a game, animation or pursue a passion project of their choice using Scratch 3.0 coding environment.”

Despite the unlimited options in the description, I wanted to offer some project guidance as I didn’t know the coding experience of those who would sign up. I decided on three projects from Code Club World that in my experience offer students the greatest creative choice coupled with step-by-step instructions.  The first option was Chatbot.  I’ve discussed how much I like this project before and with the added text-to-speech options in Scratch 3.0, I knew this would be a hit. The second option was a “clicker game” presented with Code Club World’s Ghostbusters project.  The third project was the “side-scrolling platform game” Flappy Parrot from Code Club World.  I feel any of these three projects can be accomplished in 1.5-hours with this age group.

Centaur Chatbot 

In preparation, I went through and created starter versions of these projects. I also set up a Scratch studio for everyone to share their projects. Once the students were logged into Scratch (some had to make their own, new accounts), I invited them to be curators so they could add their projects to our group studio. This part required a bit of administrative time but it is not difficult and works well for everyone to have a single place to go to play each other’s projects. I feel it is important to carve out time to share and showcase what everyone has accomplished, knowing that we all had a limited amount of time and that the projects aren’t perfect or even finished.

Chatty Winter Chatbot example

About ten students signed up for each session but only one girl in each session.  One of the math teachers joined me- she is eager to learn Scratch and we work well together.  I knew more than half of the students and some of them were with me in past Code Clubs. I think the students had a good time. I definitely feel like we supported their ideas and creativity. I’d love to get feedback from them. I shared the project studio with the school administrators and they thanked me for participating.

Chungus Run – a creative Flappy Parrot game – good instructions, too 

Some notes from the sessions:

• Time management is key with short sessions – I posted our schedule – Intro 10min/ Plan 10min/ Code 55min/ Share 15min
• The project guides were helpful even if only to get them started before they went off on coding tangents.
• These students showed creative, flexible thinking. Scratch supported their creativity by making coding flexible to their ideas.
• It is difficult to share something you know is incomplete.  I announced a time check at 15 minutes before we wanted to share, so no one was caught unaware.

Fishie Click game – former 4th grade Code Club member

Coding projects are like art – they are never really “finished” or “perfect”.  They are “done” when you decide to stop working on them. – I said this to someone who was bemoaning the end of the coding time and another student laughed.  She clarified that she was an artist and understood that fact very well.

The Majestic Bird – Well done and so annoying!

 

Poetry Generator

While planning Wednesday’s Code Club during a snow day on Tuesday I came across the Code Club World project Ada’s Poetry Generator.  This is a new project for me and I liked the way it introduced and used lists.   Arrays and lists are extremely important data structures in programming – right up there with loops and variables. I’ve never introduced lists in Scratch before.  I also liked how this project wasn’t a game but had the potential for a lot of creativity and fun.

I mocked up a project with Scratch Cat instead of Ada Lovelace.  (I did talk briefly about Ada when introducing the project.)

I added some “talking” animation to Scratch Cat by duplicating costumes and morphing the mouth into different shapes.  Then coding the costumes to change when the poem is “spoken”

Some students whined a bit about poetry and not a game but I ignored that because I knew they’d like it once they figured it out.  I’m hoping someone chooses to make a MadLib or something similar for the final project.  If not, I may see if we can use this in some language arts project.

Here are some nice examples:

Computer generating poetry with lists

This coder really liked gluteus maximus, and unhelpful list naming conventions.

Awesome animated mouth

This coder is my animator to be.  He drew and animated the PacMan and Ghost being eaten costumes… then he coded the poem in the last few minutes.

Future animator

These two below took the morphing a bit to the extreme but the coding (and poetry) is well done:

I enjoyed reading all the funny randomly generated poems that the students created.  I was glad I choose this project for my Code Club.

Game State – Game Loop

This week we tried out Code Club World’s Desert Race project.  One Code Club member used this for his independent project last round, so we had one expert.  We used his final project to demo the game. 

Desert Race is a fairly simple 2-person race to the finish.  The main concept in this game is setting a game state variable to control the action. In event driven games is important to control the allowable events – like when to start. And we don’t want anyone to cheat by starting before the start signal.  Setting up a game state variable, ‘racing’, like a Boolean with 0 (not racing) and 1 (racing) is the concept I was hoping they would take in while making a cool two person game.

Defining a Boolean for game state is the first step to building a Game Loop that programmers use when creating more complex games.

from http://GameProgrammingPatterns.com/game-loop.html

Scratch Wiki also refers to it here: https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Game_Loop.

My fourth graders may not ever get to that level of programming here in Code Club, but it is a powerful idea. I have used this programming technique in (non-Scratch) games I’ve created in the past and found it useful.

I also made a quick version of the project adding a bit of 3D perspective with my Space Race project.  The racers (cat and dog) get smaller as they head to be the first to reach the planet.

The students made some nice games. Many customized their Sprites and a couple recorded their own “win” sounds.

This one below has some almost imperceivable pitfalls that send you backwards (the opposite of a booster).

At the end of the day a few students asked to be able to keep working on the Desert Race project for next week -they needed more time and were enjoying the project.  I think I’ll let them, but I’ll need another project for those who finished or want to move on.  So I asked one of the two girls in the Club what she would like to work on and she said, how about making an ebook.  I asked if she meant like an animated story?  I’d love to focus on animation more – there are some great techniques to making things look like they are moving – I love Tumbling Santa.  Also, I’m thinking I need to show her Bubble103’s Scratch projects.  Maybe she wants to make a tutorial (nonfiction ebook).  There are a lot of How To projects on the Scratch site.  I’m considering these two options for next week.

Also awesome this week was this project:

This student’s race project was lost when Scratch 2.0 offline editor crashed. He was mostly done and he lost all his code. Instead of recreating it, he made this cool project. (It is a bit glitchy, but neat.)

Spring Code Club Session Begins

Code Club session #8 met for the first time on Wednesday.  There are eighteen 4th graders and two high school volunteers.  This is the second time I’ve had a mixture of students from both elementary schools in my city in one club.  Another thing that is cool about the Spring session is that I have returning Code Club members, or, as we call them, “experts”.  Only 5 students are new to Code Club and there was only one student I didn’t know.

A New Scratcher’s take on Maze game

After introductions, I asked the “experts” what favorite project they had from the last session of Code Club.  They remembered and liked the Maze game, Space Junk and Chatbot from CodeClubWorld. They also enjoyed the projects they had created themselves, not surprisingly.    I like starting with the Maze game and had already chosen that project for our first meeting.  It’s a simple game with many ways to make it more exciting and complex.

We started out by reviewing the maze design and refreshing our programming vocabulary.  What was the object of the game? How does the Sprite move (arrow keys or follow the mouse were options)?  What happens when you touch the edge of the maze?  How do you win?  Then we talked briefly about ways to make it more exciting – more levels, obstacles, villains, etc.

Then they got to it. They were fairly independent coders, for the most part, and they helped each other a bit, too. My high school volunteers and I think we will be able to try some more complex coding  projects this round.  It was a really fun 75 minutes.

First time Code Club member

“Expert”

Thinking ahead, here are some goals for this session of Code Club:

• Encourage more animation: We have some artists, so I’d like to share with them and encourage more creative uses of costumes for animation effects.

• Explore “more blocks”: someone is already exploring defining their own blocks.  I’d like to encourage more of this.  As well as random numbers.

• Clearing up misconceptions: We will have to revisit some concepts like the forever block and support better debugging habits

Find the glitch in this code.

It seems this “expert” puts everything in forever blocks.

• And finally – I want to use MakeyMakey‘s this time. I told them I want to use them with our projects – especially our final projects. Those couple of students who have played a bit with MakeyMakey’s were quite excited. I’m really excited (and a bit nervous). I don’t have much experience using MakeyMakey devices, with or without students.  Luckily that won’t stop me.