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.

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.

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.

Poetry Generation in Scratch

Fourth graders in Ms. Bradley’s class finished up their Hour of Code projects yesterday and we published their poetry generators in this Poetry Studio.

These students have been doing quite a bit of poetry work this fall so when I approached their teacher about a Scratch project for Computer Science Ed Week, I had Code Club World’s Ada’s Poetry Generator project in mind.

The students worked in pairs and generated a list of verbs, nouns, adverbs, and adjectives in the classroom before heading to the computer lab.  The next step was to makea stage backdrop in Scratch.  I didn’t want them to use one from the library of backdrops but to create their own.  I showed them how to quickly color fill with a gradient but they all sort of went with lines of color, which looks pretty cool.

I decided to jump into the middle of the Code Club World project and have them start with creating their lists and coding the poem generator.  I was concerned the papers with the lists of words would disappear before we had a chance to finish up the project.  I was right. We had a snow day on the day they were scheduled to complete the project.  Yesterday, last day before the break, we squeezed in the time to complete the poetry generators.

With the lists already made and the poems coded during the first session, the second work session was aimed at checking their code to make sure everything worked and adding a beginning and an end.  Could you add a second Sprite to introduce the poem generator and give instructions?  Could you some action or music at the end?

basic poem generation code.

 

 

A beginning, middle, and end.

 

Then we uploaded the projects to share with the Scratch community.

Some notes on facilitating pair work: I did talk about pair programming before we sat at the computers.  During each session, I would announce “time to switch driver and navigator” at regular intervals, as many weren’t willing to give up control on their own.

Also, don’t give them too much time to work on this or the special effects will outshine the poetry.

Don’t forget to save some time to add instructions, notes, and credits on the project page.  I need to be better at this.

It would have been great to have time to enjoy other classmates’ projects and give feedback, but at least they are posted and shared.

I would do this project again.

 

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.

Virtual Pet Event

I realize that my last two blog posts have not been about Code Club but Scratch projects that happen during school.  Code Club has been going pretty well, so let me catch up on that front.

We tried a Pong game project the second week, which I have written about before. I recall them being a bit needy during the project but I just might be remembering the whiners. I’ve seen some successful projects in the subsequent weeks from those very same needy seeming students.

Pong game design

Pong game code

There is some free time at the beginning of Code Club while we wait for the bus to bring over the coders from the other elementary school.  This gives some of them a few minutes to bring up old projects they’ve started, remember what they were doing, tweak them or show them to a friend.  Once everyone is there, we have snack and discuss the current project of the day.

The week after Pong we tried “Create a Virtual Pet” project that is under the Tips tab of Scratch 2 Offline Editor.  I was looking for a non-game project similar to Code Club World’s Chatbot project, which some of these students did last Fall, as I have written about, twice.  One of my goals is to expose these coders to a variety of project types. I think these types of projects appeal to the non-gamer types, (dare I say girls?) and shows other ways to use Scratch coding.

“Create a Virtual Pet” is also a great way to introduce the power of broadcast and receive. I feel like I didn’t cover broadcast and receive well in the Fall.  This project concentrates on the Events code blocks:  “when this sprite is clicked”, “broadcast”, and “when I receive”.

We also got to use and get to know the “glide” block.  All very useful.

I showed the students the Tips tab that they could use as a resource but I also printed out some screenshots from “Create a Virtual Pet” for them to use. I did try looking for a pdf of this project.  I found a video tutorial, a Scratch project tutorial and a 41 page pdf from We Can Code It which looks fabulous, but more than I needed.

I took some time to introduce this and showed my take on the project at the beginning.

My Penguin Pet

scary number of blocks

 

I prefer to let them discover their way but I’ve a feeling this group could benefit from more introduction.  I think the number of lines of code it used, although mostly glide blocks, put them off a little.

birthday message

virtual birthday pet

Most of the students were not able to get all the way through the project and some seemed disappointed by this when Code Club was over so soon.  I was pleased with what they got done and told them so and that this would make a nice project for the Showcase if they chose.

cheese puff eating pet

message to eat

The designs for those independent projects are due real soon.