Schools all over America are participating in Hour of Code this week including Oak Hills Elementary!
One cool by-product of sharing your teaching experiences on a blog is you can look back at what you have done in past years! I first wrote about Hour of Code in December of 2013 in a blog post entitled "Hour of Code" Week - December 9-15, which as luck would have it, was the very first year of Hour of Code. Without realizing it, my students and I were at the ground level of this popular coding movement. The Code.org mission then and now is to involve more students in computer science. They have certainly made great strides toward their original goal. These are the stats from their website.
For Lakeville Schools, this is the first year with our newly adopted Coding Learning Progression for our elementary schools. Even though most of our elementary schools were already participating in coding activities, this new progression serves as a guiding document for insuring that it is done with more intention and fidelity. Once Hour of Code week is over, which I am spearheading in our classrooms, our students will be participating in 8 more lessons with their STEM teachers to make sure they continue to gain knowledge, skill and confidence in their own ability to code.
At Oak Hills, our students had a blast with their initial Hour of Code activity, to code their teacher! Yep, they coded their teacher with a set of blockly code instructions, and all of our teachers (pictured below are Mrs. Bakke and Mr. Hemann) were great sports about it! Their classes had a blast trying to code their teacher's movements. Almost all of the classes had bugs in their code that had to be worked out. This collaborative coding effort was great for getting students to think about how precise their language had to be to get their teacher to do what they wanted. I created blockly magnets for the students to get the hang of it and to scaffold their learning when they begin blockly coding on their devices.
Next, I introduced Blue-Bots to our students. Blue-Bots are a fun tool for teaching students programming logic. Blue-Bots are great because they can be manually programmed on the buttons on their back, or they can be connected via bluetooth and programmed via device app.
For our second Hour of Code activity, students used the manual programming option for pair programming, followed by coding collaborative groups to make their Blue-Bots line dance. OH WHAT FUN! Our students loved the freedom to figure it out. Without realizing it they were collaborating to debug their code continually. Teachers seemed thrilled with the soft and hard skills our students learned and practiced during this hour, and I was delighted with the results of our OHE Hour of Code for 2018!