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

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).

Star Wars and a Rogue

May the 4th was this week. This week had the first Monday of May.  The first Monday of May is when my library code club meets.  I was thinking of setting up a Scratch Day project for them, but it was May-the-4th, so obviously I pivoted to a Star Wars theme.

One of a few Star Wars day studios

Finding Star Wars-themed projects was not hard.  There are a few studios with over 100 projects in them.  A lot of these are fan artwork.  There are some incredible artists in the Scratch community.

I found a project with just a color-changing lightsaber that I thought would make a great starter for a wide range of creative ideas.  I found another project where some standard Scratch Sprites (Gobo, Pico, Nano) have been transformed into Star Wars characters.  Great starter for a Chatbot.  I also imagined a Kessel run maze game would make a nice option for my Creative Coders.

Star Wars Doodle

Kessel run maze?

I came across this Mandalorian translator which I thought was a great idea.  (If only there was a Google translate for Star Wars languages.  Isn’t there one for Klingon?) I helped the coder out with a suggestion to make it better and got a generous “DUDE thanks” in return.

I put these all together in a class studio and was ready for our virtual club meeting.

**What’s with the new changes to class studios with class passwords?  I can’t find documentation on how it looks from the student’s view or how to explain this to students.  Also, now that I have more than 20 studios in my class I have a hard time adding projects to studios while looking at a project.  Now  I must save and favorite projects then go to the studio and add projects that I’ve favorited.**  

My library code club was a small group but I was happy to see them and show them the projects I had curated for them.  They seemed to have ideas of what they wanted to create. It’s still weird to send them off to code and just hope they don’t get stuck or get frustrated and not continue.  I told them I would be around coding as well and if they needed help to share their project and comment and I would try to respond quickly.  They each did a project and shared it.  They riffed on my starter of Luke’s saber practice.  One added scoring and another changed it into a pong game.  Which is a great idea.  Meanwhile, I worked to improve my Kessel run project (though it is not great yet).

Luke’s saber practice project

I had so much fun that I decided to present the same projects to Wednesday’s school code club.  That’s where the rogue part comes in.

Last Friday during a virtual math meeting that had been canceled but no one told me, I hosted a couple of other students who hadn’t got the memo from their parents.  A pair of us started to talk shop about Code Club and I invited one of the other math students to join.  He had been on the code club waiting list and is becoming quite the techno wiz – gifs, crazy characters, Roblox, etc. during this #stayathome remote learning time. He accepted and proceeded to jump fully into the Scratch community.

On Monday he invited me to curate a studio he had set up. He has also found a couple of the other active online Scratchers in the club and now the three of them are the CEOs of the studio (uh, uber-curators?  I was invited, too, but not promoted to CEO).  They are adding projects they are making, commenting on and liking each other’s projects, and asking each other for help. My rogue Code Club member has created 7 projects in 5 days! IT IS AMAZING! Together they have compiled their self-created cool maze games, Zelda themed animations, random works of art, and other amusing projects.  I could not be happier that they have found their own spot together within the Scratch community.  I’m looking at it as a bright spot in this time of social distancing that they have found a community.

I read the profile of one of my other students and it said he’s only 9 but wants to still be a Scratcher when he is 50. So sweet.

 

One last note.  I had the idea to make a Zoom chat from the Star Wars morphed Scratch Sprites, then I found this Sprite Zoom project – it is hilarious!  I shared it with my math class on Zoom today.  We could all relate so much!!!

Ready to become a Star Wars Zoom meeting

I don’t think I could match that with my Star War Zoom plans.  I hope one of my students gives it a remix.

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.

3d Printing Club

I have wanted to run a 3d printing club for middle schoolers for a while now (since I discovered BeetleBlocks).  I specifically wanted to have a 3d printing club where we focused on jewelry making in hopes of getting MS girls interested in STEM. I have a 3d printing business and sell my 3d printed jewelry on Etsy and at the Lebanon Farmer’s Market. I see many of my students at the market and know that 3d printing jewelry might be the hook to get more girls interested in 3d printing.

My earring design ready for sale – a shared project on BeetleBlocks

Yesterday my dream of having a 3d printing club became a reality at the Lebanon Public library and with the collaboration of two librarians. We were able to borrow two 3d printers from libraries around New Hampshire and schedule a couple of summer sessions.  We met a week prior to the first session, when we had the printers, to make sure we could run them and change the filaments, etc.  We have an Ultimaker 2 Go and a MakerBot Replicator.  This is a bit complicated as they take different size filaments and use different programs to prepare the models.  We have some jewelry findings and different color filaments – silver, gold, bronze in 1.75 mm for the MakerBot and blue in 3 mm for the Ultimaker.

We were hoping to get 3 printers and have 3 students per printer for a group of 9, but only 5 had signed up so we opted to go with just 2 printers as the third was at a library on the other side of the state.  When I got there on Monday, there were 9 students.  The librarians had decided to let the drop-in students stay and I was fine with that.

My notes for my intro to the 3d design & printing process.

After a brief introduction where I wanted to make sure that they understood 3d printing was an iterative process not unlike the engineering design process, I showed them a jar full of bad prints from my jewelry printing business.  Then we got started.

For the first of the two sessions, I introduced BeetleBlocks and we created simple rings by measuring and using a tube shape (Here’s my video tutorial). In just three lines of code, the rings were created and we were able to have them export and save to a flash drive/sd card.  We loaded half onto one printer and half onto the other and started printing them. Rings take about 5-9 minutes each.  The goal was to have something to take home by the end of the session. Then during the week they could drop in and print another, bigger, individual print like a pendant or a pair of earrings, etc.. The librarians had a list of times when they would be available during the week to help the students print another ring or a pendant.  I thought this would alleviate the problem of having enough class time to get everything printed.

I created a second video tutorial on how to code a pendant or earring from a squiggle. There wasn’t time to go over the whole tutorial during the session and anyway students were busy exploring BeetleBlocks: adding their names to the rings, looking at community projects, playing with extrusions and other shapes. While some just wanted to watch the printers for a while.

Extrusion pendant by a middle school coder

Next week we are going to explore TinkerCAD as another application that I know that makes it easy to create 3d designs.

Superpower Challenge

Monday was the last meeting of the library code club for the year. It was one of those rare warm and sunny New England Spring days and consequently, we had a small group of six.

I went through all of the different projects we worked on over the school year by looking at the projects in the class studios since October.

October: Animated name/Random stuff about me

November: Pong or Catch

December: Christmas Present game or snowball fight game

January: Scratch 3.0/ Year 3000 and text-to-speech

February: Video sensing

March: more video sensing (by popular demand), timers & timing

April: Finite state machine/ Green up your city

For May, I was going to let them revisit one of their creations from the last year and finish or improve it. This is something they ask for when they leave each month. They ask me if they can work on the same project next time. I’m not convinced that they would have the same passion for a project a month later. Still, it is a good idea to look back and reflect on the projects of the past year.

Meanwhile, an email from Code Club USA came and mentioned their Superpower Activate challenge. That sounded fun to me. Superpowers don’t have to be like in the comic books, they can be simple, like being a good friend, helping people, coding, being a team player, quoting movies, or not getting caught with gum in math class.  I came up with this one for me.

I wasn’t sure how the superpower prompt would go over, but they seemed excited about it after I presented it and showed them my project. I was sure one student was going to work on a previous project, but later I saw him putting together an awesome superpower project.  Four of them made superpower projects to share in our May studio.

Superpower: eating tacos

Superpower: space control

Basketball -improved and a superpower

Baseball superpower

One improved a prior project and turned it into her superpower project and one student created a new project about riddles – which might be his superpower.  We were certainly stumped by his riddles.

I really enjoy leading this group of creative, middle school coders.  We have a small core of coders who have come each month over the last two year and we often have first-time Scratchers as well.  This makes it complicated to find projects so that everyone can be challenged and successful. The creative prompts and projects I find from the Scratch community, Code Club, & Scratch Design Studio have really been engaging.  They have been designed, as Mitch Resnick says, with low floors, high ceilings, and wide walls.

Summertime MakeyMakey

Last Tuesday was the fourth and final session of the summer Creative Coding Club at the public library.  It was MakeyMakey time.

The library now has four MakeyMakey devices available to check out! Combined with the eight I borrowed from my school, we had enough for each person to have their own. The library also has Colleen and Aaron Graves’ book 20 Makey Makey Projects for the Evil Genius. I spent some time looking through it ahead of time and ended up building the marble maze project. It had just the right “difficulty to fun” ratio for me.

I also gathered some supplies, built a couple of pressure switches, and made conductive playdough (I made a gluten-free version with chickpea flour and the kids thought it smelled odd).  I put a few example projects into our Summer #4 Scratch class studio.

Starter MakeyMakey projects

At the library, we had a fully stocked supply table, thanks to Kathy, and I set up a homemade dance mat (foil and cardboard), the marble maze, and a playdough button piano as examples.

I often find it difficult to introduce and explain what a MakeyMakey device does in a clear, efficient way.  It is much easier to show the MakeyMakeys in action then let the students explore. Three of the students had used MakeyMakey devices before (at our session in May) so they helped me explain to the others.  I did try to hit the key concepts about making a complete circuit or connecting yourself to earth and what to code to get a response.

The best thing about this session was that we had the gift of time.  Extra time to play and explore.  We were just doing this one open-ended thing – playing with MakeyMakey devices and Scratch. The whole time. 90 minutes. It was lovely. We were on Summertime, where you could dive into a project and not worry about constantly moving on to the next thing.

One student had a banana, a potato, a cucumber, and a ball of playdough connected to her music project. Another student made playdough buttons to play his Moonhack project from the previous session.  Another made a 2-player rocket race game.

At one point I walked by two of the girls and they both just had the biggest grins on their faces while playing banana pianos and adjusting their code.

Staying connected to earth was tricky. I made a playdough ring for my finger but that didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. Other students had other ideas.

Pinkie connection to earth

Wrist connections to earth

One student, near the end, told me he failed. He’s my big idea kid, always exploring the boundaries and testing even bigger ideas. A simple banana piano? Forget it. He thinks up complex ideas and tries them out. He and I both weren’t phased by his declaration, and I didn’t try to help him “be successful”. I just nodded and sat with him for a second in case he wanted to explain where he had failed but he just went on to try some other idea.

My one takeaway on this session was how lovely it was to have time to explore and not hurry off to something else. I enjoyed this slower paced session and they did, too. I have to remember not to over schedule our time and stop worrying about them running out of things to do.

We did stop to share and admire what everyone was doing and then the pizza arrived! Great way to end.

I hope some of these Scratchers check out one of the library’s MakeyMakeys and spend more time exploring the possibilities.

Create Your Own World

I don’t usually blog in the summer, but I’m running a weekly summer code club at the library in July and I’m being a bit reflective about the monthly one that I helped lead this last year.

Earlier in the year, I introduced a new (to me, too) project to the Lebanon Library Creative Coders. We decided to take two of our monthly meetings, February and March, to work on the Create Your Own World project from Code Club World.  I knew this middle school age group would enjoy creating a platform game. One of them even continued to work on it for a third month and was able to add a lot of detail like hit points, inventory list, and bad guys.

 

World detailed with inventory, hp, weapon and bad guys.

The first meeting we focused on setting up the player movement.  We remixed Code Club Rik’s Resources for this project so we could jump right in with the coding.  When I was prepping for our meeting, I went ahead and changed the character from a square to an overhead view of a guy walking.  One of my original groups of students created Showcase projects called Tomb of Terror and Shadow Swamp with Hatty McWalker.  That’s who I was thinking of with this guy.

Overhead view of my player.  I added a costume with the mirror image and a “next costume” block in my code to make him look like he is walking.

The Creative Coders were certainly creative with the movement options.  I’m used to using arrow keys for movement, but these middle schoolers liked ASWD and this creative ghoulish option with side arrows for turning and up for forward:

Ghoul movement code

Ghoul world

 

I’m finding it useful to look at the code more closely.  There are some interesting, creative coding going on and I’m seeing some misconceptions that will help me help them debug their code.

Well coded ASWD movement and wall checking

I’ve seen this forever-forever coding before. Something is not working like they expect and they try to solve it with nested forever loops.

Nested infinite (practically) loops didn’t fix the problem – switching to the “play sound until done” block did.

Or they are checking for an event and forget to put in the forever loop:

One time event checking?

This wall checking code has been separated from the key-press event giving no response.

If touching wall move in all directions at once.

A couple of the coders explored more blocks where you can define your own.  This led to a teaching moment for me to explain how these function blocks worked.  It turned out less useful than my right-click to duplicate code suggestion.

defining a new block without the definition

Defining a new block

 

 

All in all, they impressed me. In the moment I’m not always sure what is going on with everyone and even at the end when we stop to share what we’ve accomplished I don’t always know how they did.

Some of them didn’t want to continue what they had started the month before, but they were self-motivated and independent enough to work on their own projects.

Cookie clicker

Cat maze with levels

I love that this crew is supportive of each other and willing to share their ideas and compliments.

I appreciate good, supportive commenting

Some of the same students have signed up for the summer session. I’m looking forward to it.