Return to 4th grade Code Club

One of my high school seniors wanted to do a service project teaching coding to elementary students. He loved our field trip to the elementary school that shares a campus with us and wanted to know when we could go to his former elementary school (across town) and do the same.

I knew that would take a different approach than a field trip and I suggested an afterschool code club. We discussed the details and settled on 5 sessions, weekly, after school in January-February, 90 minutes long, for 12-15 students. He wrote the proposal email to the elementary principal and sought funding for snacks for the club. Everything fell into place.

News spread about our code club, and the roster filled up in a day and one of the 4th grade teachers volunteered their room for us to use. We also recruited high school students as coaches and found plenty of former code club students who remembered when they were in my code club and volunteered to help. We finished up our 5-week code club last month with 11 students and 6 coaches (and me). Here’s how it went:

Google Classroom for coaches to plan lessons

Logistics & Communication: I created a Google classroom for the coaches and a place to put all the materials and planning documents. There I could announce what project we would do next and the coaches could tell me if they could come or not. Although, mostly they would stop by my room and let me know. Three of the coaches were in my last CS class of the day and others would stop by if they needed a ride from one of those students, or to let me know they were taking the bus.

Scratch class with studios for each week

Accounts: For the code club members, I created a Scratch class and student accounts. Each week I would create a new studio and put in an example project. Near the end of each session, the coaches and I would encourage students to share and add their projects to the week’s studio. I or a coach would play each project on the classroom projector so everyone could see their project on the big screen.

Format: Each meeting was the same format: We would arrive and the students would be in the classroom. We’d take attendance, meet on the rug to discuss the day’s coding project, break for a snack, and then get started. Each student had a school Chromebook and they sat in table groups of 3-4. I or one of the coaches would do some live coding and others would hand out printed Code Club project guides or Scratch project cards. Coaches would circulate and help the students (as best they could) and miraculously we’d get a bunch of creative projects to share before the meeting ended.

Catch Game projects shared by first time Scratch coders.

Lesson 1: Catch Game – It’s a pretty big deal when you can make a game on your very first day learning to code in Scratch. I’ve written about Catch Game before. It’s a nice way to start. I used the Scratch card resources for the students to follow. (I print either 2 or 4 to a page to save on paper).

Chase Game projects shared by 4th grade Code Club students.

Lesson 2: Chase Game – another easy game that uses different code blocks. A lot of creativity here. I’ve written about this game as well. I remember the chase games 2 of my coaches made when they were in code club. I had the original Code Club World Felix and Herbert packet and I had the Scratch resource, but I wanted a hybrid of the two approaches, so I wrote my own.

Side-scrolling game examples

Lesson 3: The 4th graders love making games and the feedback from the parents was also positive – they noticed how much their student enjoyed Code Club, and were appreciative that we were providing this opportunity. So I found another game, Jumping Game, that was easy enough to make but different enough to be something new.

Virtual pets with text-to-speech by 4th grade code club members.

Lesson 4: Virtual Pet! This is one of my favorites and it’s not technically a game. With such a short 5-week program, I introduced a lot this week. In addition to the virtual pet game, I showed the students Zinnea’s Mouse Trail video. It was a nice diversion at the beginning of Code Club, but once they got into making their virtual pet, no one actually tried out making a magic wand. I also introduced Scratch’s text-to-speech block because many of the members had learned how to record their own sounds – but it was generally just them talking over all the background noise in the room. I thought they could have their pet introduce themselves with text-to-speech.

Noise Level: The coaches (my high schoolers) had noticed that Code Club was really loud – a lot of talking and Sprite sounds playing in the room. While it is generally fun to have your Sprites make sounds, it can be really loud if everyone is playing sounds. We didn’t have any headphones, so we had to remind students to keep the volume down.

Sports games for the final week

Lesson 5: Final Week – They asked many times for a sports game. So for the last week, we tried Scratch Cat Goes Skiing or Beat the Goalie! Both projects are from RPi Foundation’s Scratch projects, so I was able to put started projects in our weekly studio and the students would have the background and costumes for the projects. They turned out well for such difficult projects. Our last day was also Valentine’s Day, so I made this quick project Valentine for you in case anyone was interested in making a Valentine with the pen and stamp tools. Mostly they wanted to make games.

Valentine’s for Coaches – one of the code club members made Valentines for each of the coaches and me. It was so sweet. I’m pretty sure the high schoolers had not been given a Valentine for a long time.

Good enough: Five weeks was a good enough length. It was a lot of work being in charge of not just the 4th graders but of the coaches as well. To be honest, I had too many high schoolers coaching and their attention span and appropriate behavior weren’t much better than the 4th graders. So I ended up managing both groups. It was all good though. Good for the coaches to work with younger kids, pay it forward, and remember when they participated in Code Club. Good for the 4th graders to get to learn to code, and see older kids who like to code model coding. And good for my high school Computer Science program as these students move through the school district and may plan to take CS courses at the high school.

Virtual Showcase 2022

Last week was my 13th showcase of projects for my 4th grade after-school Code Club and my 2nd one that was held virtually. We made it. After three weeks of working on their major independent project and some online meeting craziness, they presented 14 final (or near-final) projects.

For our virtual showcase format, a project was presented by the creator, then the students played or enjoyed the project, and finally, they gave a quick positive feedback comment while the next student got ready to present. We had 14 projects presented in one hour. Amazing.

The final projects show a great deal of creativity and variety. It is incredible how much work went into some of these projects. I am very impressed with this group of students and grateful they all took the club seriously. I know it was not an ideal situation to learn to code in an online group but these kids were pretty motivated. They were also pretty self-sufficient and knew how to advocate for themselves to get the help they needed. They were also very patient when waiting for me to help them.

I enjoyed watching their projects progress over the weeks. Here are a few projects I am particularly impressed with: The Pipe is a maze game with a cool introduction, a couple of levels, and a secret code level.

I also like Cheesy Puffs clicker: This is a clicker game with a lot of flair. I knew this coder wanted to make a clicker game so I provided some material in our classroom to support him. I think he also found other clicker games on the Scratch community to get some ideas.

I am also really impressed by Shielder. I’m not sure how this was created but I don’t doubt that the student who created this could create this.

These next four really reflect the creativity and personality of their creators.

The quality of these projects is no different from any other showcase from other Code Clubs. It is just that this virtual code club felt like a lot of work because of the virtual nature of helping students with their coding issues remotely, but the results are gratifying. I hope they find more coding opportunities in the future.

Virtual Code Club Projects

I’m running another round of my after-school 4th grade Code Club virtually again. We are halfway through our 10-week session and have one more learning project next week before the students start working their final showcase projects. Students from the other side of town have joined us with their Code Club coach, Ms. G, just like last year.

I had 19 students sign up and 4 from the other side of town and we average 16 students online each week. We’ve used breakout rooms to divide the group to be able to help more students while they are working through the learning projects. We’ve offered two different projects one week – Maze and Flappy Parrot to give the students some options. We are using Google Classroom to communicate, post materials, and share Scratch studio links. A few students have dropped out because the virtual environment is too hard or stressful to manage while learning to code. I’ve offered my time in person during recess to support students in person.

Favorite things example

We started with our favorite things projects the first week to get to know each other. It helped to work through some basics of Scratch, signing in, sharing to studios, etc. as well as a refresher on Google Meet protocols – raising hands, chat etiquette and presenting. Then 2 Chatbot, 3 Space Junk, 4 Maze & Flappy Parrot, and finally next week, Create your own world. Many of my favorite projects! Ms. G would create and share a studio. I would create an example or starter project and post the material to our classroom.

Flappy parrot or Mazes week

Virtual Code Club revisited

Sometimes when it’s been too long since my last post it’s hard write about everything to catch up and I put off writing. Now it’s been longer so I’m going to just write and get started again.

This summer I thought my library club would be able to return to an in-person Code Club for middle school students 10-13 in the fall, but that didn’t happen and we’ve been holding our monthly meetings virtually.

In October I prepared to introduced the how to make a mouse trail video by Zoe/Zinnea, on the Scratch Team YT channel. A super fun, easy project with lots of room for creative play.

@ScratchTeam YT Channel Mouse Trail tutorial

I created a starter project in our Fall studio and also was prepared with alternative ideas including the Scratchtober SDS prompt.

Scratchtober design studio

I had one kid come to the online meeting. The same single kid that has been joining all summer long. She and I were a bit disappointed no one else joined. Coding is more fun with friends. We made the best of it and created cool mouse trail projects and hoped more kids would join in November.

In November I was really thinking if only one person comes that I should pause Code Club until we can meet in person. I prepared the Silly eyes project from Code Club. I love getting email from Code Club with new projects to try with my Creative coders! The silly eyes are separate sprites that swivel to point towards the mouse. I had seen and tried this type of animation years ago (Read a book project) but it was nice to have the step by step project directions for the students. I added RPiFoundation’s Gobo Watching as an example or remixable project to our club’s Scratch studio but didn’t have much hope anyone would show up. And….

Five kids showed up to code! Four made silly eyes projects and one tried the mouse trail project. Yay for Code Club. I guess we will keep meeting and persevere.

My Code Club’s November projects

Code Club’s virtual future

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.

My virtual library code club’s Winter studio

My virtual library code club’s Spring studio

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.

Ingenuity on Mars project start from JMGSTEM

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.

Creative Video sensing space themed projects

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.

Butterfly Gardens

On November 2nd my library code club met to create the 2nd project in Code Club’s new Look after yourself module. It was the day before the US General Election and I felt a butterfly garden would be a good project for kids to make for their stressed parents.

I had created a similar project earlier in the year for Scratch Month from one of their Scratch in Practice prompts How Do You Peace Out? I used it with my school’s virtual Code Club in May.

Peace Outside – https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/395031013/

I created a starter project and put it in our Take Care studio. For the starter I gathered some garden photos that I found online in a Reader’s Digest article about attracting butterflies into the garden and added them to the stage for different backgrounds.

Info from my virtual handout.

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/443868962

To prepare for teaching this I made this project. I was having a good time with making each butterfly have a different type of movement. I really like making interactive projects so I wanted to see if the user could have some influence with the butterflies – be an attractor – but without the constancy of simply following the mouse pointer forever. I added a temporary influence to trigger when you click on the stage, then all butterflies receive the message to point towards the mouse- pointer, then 2 seconds later they point in a random direction. I was going to make a time variable but then realized I just needed a wait block. There is additional code in the butterfly Sprites scripts that keeps them constantly moving.

I enjoyed having some fun with the challenge part of the project.

My librarian co-leader was concerned that students would forget about Code Club on that Monday and she was right. We only had two club members join us. One student really, really wanted to keep working on a project that he had previously started – from earlier in the year – and I let him. This is a club (not school) and he looked like he needed a chance to go with his choice/passion. He was surprised, I think, that I said yes because he asked me again, just to confirm, if he could work on this other project.

So, I only got one student example of a butterfly garden, but it’s well done.

Creative Coder’s Butterfly Garden https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/444293651/

Next time we are going to skip ahead to Focus on the Prize project – because it’ll be December and the project has present boxes in it!

This butterfly project is so fun I wanted to introduce it to more students. I have a 4th grade class that started Scratch in October – They did the Trick or Treat project and had a great time. To prepare, I added more garden pictures to my starter project. I also found some free nature sounds from SoundBible.com and added them to the Stage sound assets. We were only going to have 45 minutes to create and share our projects and I didn’t want students to spend their whole time gathering sound and backgrounds. It was also an opportunity to explain the Remix philosophy of the Scratch Community.

My 4th grade class’s butterfly garden starter project:

The students really enjoyed editing the colors of the butterflies- I showed them how to do gradient fill and how to stretch the shape of the butterflies, too.

We created three butterfly Sprites, each with a different movement style – a glide to random place, a bounce around the screen and a move in a circle. I also showed them how to code a “follow the mouse pointer” script. After that, they had a few minutes to add more. They asked if they could add non-butterfly Sprites. I said yes as long as it fit our goal to make a peaceful, nature inspired project – so still nature/garden appropriate critters – dragonflies, beetles, birds, snakes, fish…

Then they shared to our Peaceful studio and checked out each other’s projects. I’m really proud of how they turned out. I would try this project again with more groups.

Project in our Peaceful studio

Creative Stress Relief

My library coder’s club for middle school students started up again today. We are meeting once a month, virtually.

Creative Coder’s Club library publicity

Last month I received an email from Code Club about their latest new Scratch module and decided that these were just what I needed for my club.

Code Club email

It’s a new year and I won’t know who will show up, who will be new to Scratch, or who will be a returning Scratcher who has done my go-to starter projects. The Stress Ball project was a good fit as a first project for my code club.

My sample project:Pink de-stresser

I created a studio for the well-being module called Take Care and sent out the project info, virtual meeting info and hoped people would sign up and show up. We had 7 coders sign up.

Really cool coder project: Changing stress ball

Six coders showed up to code, which was fantastic! My librarian co-host had some internet trouble at the beginning, but I saw most of the coders faces on screen, which was exciting, and only two were returning students.

I started the meeting by going over the Scratch Community Guidelines and making sure everyone was signed in to their online account. They had the option of using one of my student accounts if they didn’t have their own. I sent out the info for these using the private chat feature of the meeting.

Halloween themed Stressball project

I went slowly through the project, sharing my screen as I created the stress ball, slowing down when coders asked questions. I really appreciated that they would advocate for themselves when they were following what I was doing. It is not easy to know how to pace a virtual meeting and was happy to hear the coders say something when they needed guidance. That doesn’t always happen, but with only six, it was easy for me to check on each student to see how things were going. The project was fairly simple, which helped.

Stress ball code

I made it through the basic project directions in the first half hour which left 15 minutes for everyone to make creative improvements before we shared and played our projects in the last 15.

Cat stress ball

I was really proud that almost everyone was able to add their creative touches, share their projects, and even add their project to our shared class studio. I was able to troubleshoot some issues by asking the coders to share their screens, but mostly those turned out to be account issues -like not being able to “share” a project in a new Scratch account until the email address is confirmed. (That coder was able to share and add his project to our studio later that day. Yay!) I find that adding projects to a studio can be a tricky endeavor sometimes. Navigating to the studio when you aren’t part of the class can be tricky. Inviting curators without knowing how to spell the Scratchers username is tricky. Adding a project you haven’t shared yet – oops, can’t do that – so it’s also tricky. I am getting better at troubleshooting and helping students be successful at this. And it leads to one of the fun parts of being part of the Scratch community- to be able to see and play each others projects.

One student declined to share and I could see there were some frustrations with the coding (and a parent had come in to view to help and explain he was still working on it and didn’t have anything yet). Perfectly understandable. If he needed more time, he had access to all the resources, he could come back at another time and add more.

Expert level coding!

I was also very impressed with one of my returning coders. He took the time to write up directions and play other club members projects and give them good feedback, too. He also helped me out during the Zoom meeting by leaving me comments in the chat. He also sent me a nice note. And exemplar Scratcher.

Sweet thank you note.

As we were signing off at the end and talking up next month’s Butterfly Garden project, I wondered if any of the coders were international students like we have had before. I think a couple of them may have been Canadian. One said it was dark outside at her house, so she’s definitely from a different time zone. I do hope they all come back next month. I sure had a great time. I hope they all did.

Take care

International Code Club

This summer I’ve been hosting a weekly virtual code club for middle school students (ages 9-12) through my local library. It started slow at the beginning with one or less students each week. But over the weeks it has grown and now we are up to four or five!! It doesn’t sound like very much, but from talking to Christina from Code Club, that’s not unusual size for virtual code clubs.

I’ve been enjoying setting up the Scratch lessons each week. They included these topics:

Animation

Imaginary Sports – a Scratch Design Studio prompt for June

Music and Sound

Text-to-Speech & Translate

Examples from our studio https://scratch.mit.edu/studios/27193347/

Catch Game

Space Invaders

Pen blocks & Stamps

We have two more weeks where we will make a “How to” Scratch project and end with a “Surprise” project -using a prompt from Getting Unstuck 2020.

Each week I create a Scratch studio with some sample projects and a sharable document with some code tips or project instructions (or links to online project instructions), and I include the link to our weekly studio and virtual meeting. Students are invited to the weekly studio to remix what’s there and then share and add their project to the studio. I started out adding them as curators, but it was easier to temporarily open the studio to allow anyone to add projects and then turn off that option later.

Despite the low numbers, the meeting were successful in that those who showed up learned and created projects they were proud of. I’m proud of them, too. I like to spend the last 10 minutes letting the student share their screen to demo their projects – or let me play their projects if they’re shy. Later I will go and view any more projects that get added or shared to play, favorite, and comment on them.

This last week we found out that two of our participants actually live in Canada when one asked if we all were from her province. That’s the thing with online clubs, there’s no physical boundaries. I had to say, no, some of us were in New Hampshire. It didn’t seem to matter to her. Or any of us. We were having a good time coding and hanging out together.

I’m not sure how my club happened to get some Canadian middle school Scratchers. The library posts the offering on their website and parents can email to sign up. I always have a librarian as a co-host and second adult, as recommended by the Raspberry Pi Foundation (Code Club’s parents organization). She is the one to forward the meeting link and shared document to those who’ve signed up. Our meeting link is not on the website.

A couple of weeks ago I was commenting on one of my participant’s own Story studio to ask her if I could share her studio with the Creative Coders. Another Scratcher commented back and asked if they could join the club. I posted the library sign up link there in the comments. I wonder if they followed through? The librarian noted once, earlier in the summer, that one of the parents asked what time zone the meeting was in. So, I guess, that makes my code club an International Code Club. Pretty exciting!

I’ve learned a lot this summer, too. I’m more comfortable with the online format. I’m getting used to the awkwardness of everyone quietly coding for a half hour with very little questions. I’m quicker at navigating around and finding students recently shared projects. I’m learning what type of projects work in this remote setting.

If you want to know more about the project documents I share with the students, here’s an example (without the meeting link).

Putting it Out There

I have been remiss in blogging. This is week 6 of my Virtual Code Club.  I have been adjusting my expectations (as we all have) as I keep posting weekly activities for my students, hoping they are useful or enjoyed (or noticed). Virtual code club is both easy to do and hard to know if it is worth it or even hitting a mark. I get very little feedback and that’s okay. It’s not about me, really, except that I do this because I enjoy working with the students.  So most of what I love about Code Club has vanished and I’ve become a curator of project ideas for students that I know.

My curated virtual code club list of projects

I have opened my code club up to all 4th graders in my school and have had some additional students join. Some who traditionally don’t participate in after school programs and some who would normally have scheduling conflicts with their after school sports.  All of my Code Club members have at least joined our virtual Google Classroom so they took the first step. Some may be looking at the projects and doing them offline, where I can’t see. Some may be overwhelmed, which is understandable, given the #stayathome orders. I don’t really know as I haven’t received many comments in Classroom. I know a few students are working on projects, maybe 1/5.  I have heard from a few parents but just to get their student’s account for online Scratch. There, at least, I can see who’s posting projects.

Code Club is Fun: Q&A project results

I’ve hosted two video-conferencing Code Break meet-ups. It was great to see the kids. I invited them to ask questions. I shared my screen and showed them how to find our code club studios, how to log on, how to share projects.  I even did a little bit of coding to inspire them to try it.  The first conference had 4-5 kids and the second only 2 kids.  It was really fun to see them and hear their enthusiasm for coding with Scratch.  One student asked where everyone was? and how could there be anything better to do than code club at this moment? And that’s who I do this for.

Earth Day project from my code club

I’ve also connected with my monthly Library code club and have held a couple of virtual meetings. One with 2 students, one with a single student and one, over April break, one with no students- just the librarian and me.  We are planning to continue in May and switch to weekly through the summer.  I just want this opportunity to be there for students during these exceptional times.

It’s all fine, just totally different than in-person meetings where I can observe the learning and the fun.

This week was a little bit better.  Even though only two students joined me in the video conference, I’ve seen an uptick in activity around this week’s project – make an Earth Day Google-doodle that I found from CS First.  I’ve been able to help a student get started and he’s been asking good questions in the comments.

Being thanked by a student is something special!

It’s enough for me to keep going.

And so we go on.

Virtual Code Club

Last week I took my Code Club virtual as we are all trying to do in education during this time of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Here’s what I did:

I created a Google Classroom and invited all my Code Club members to join.  I created my first post, added the materials, created a short video of me introducing the concept and emailed it all out to all the parents.

Our first lesson was Virtual Pet – here is my lesson Virtual Code Club #1. I kept the format the same as our in-person meeting – Greeting, Discussion, Learning Objective, Project information. I added some links to former Code Club project examples and posted it as material in my Classroom. I didn’t want this to be an assignment with a grade or due date.  This is for fun.

The majority of my Code Club has accepted my invitation, including my middle-school helpers. Parents emailed back and were thankful and very much appreciated the idea of Code Club continuing. I had a few student comments of “This is fun” and one student who got stuck but then figured it out before I could help him out.  It went like this:

S: I tried this and it didn’t work.

S: What should I do?

S: Oh wait, it’s working now.

Me: What a great example of debugging. Keep testing and trying options. Let me know how it goes.

S: It’s working perfectly now.

My students are young, 9-10 years old, and most of them use Scratch offline versions – like I use with them at school, so I can’t see their projects.  That is one of the toughest parts of virtual for me.  I’m not getting to see their projects.  A lot of them are learning quickly about Classroom and virtual meetings with their class through Meet or Zoom. Eventually, we may do this as well (and I can wear my Scratch cat earrings again).

Today I got an email about #ScratchAtHome from Scratch In Practice.  I will see what support they have and perhaps they’ll have some suggestions for sharing project files and other learning opportunities for my students to be creative with Scratch.

I’m working on this week’s virtual code club project: Flappy Parrot – one of my favorites.  Then I may need to figure out a way to take my Library Code Club virtual, too.

Stay safe and wash your hands.