‘All About Me’

‘An Addition Challenge’

Build A Band: A Kettle of Drums

A Magic Spelling Game

A Story for Halloween – ‘In a Dark, Dark Wood’

A Simple Maze Game: Mouse Quest’

A Maze Game: Polar Bear meets Penguin’

‘Auto Drawing’

Story Telling using Scratch: ‘Excuses for being late for school’

A Slideshow using Scratch: ‘Trees’ by Joyce Kilmer

Images and music used in these are all attributed on the individual projects.

A recent very useful discovery is the huge range of royalty free music

produced by Kevin McLeod on incompetech.com . It is important to observe

copyright and websites like this one are invaluable. The right music can

make all the difference to a piece.

This summer I did an excellent online summer course

with CPD College, Ireland.

It was called ‘Get your children programming with ‘Scratch”.

There was great substance to the learning and a depth of knowledge.

As as result I feel confident about

teaching Scratch to my students in the future.

At the beginning of the course I could only do the most basic programming:

By the end of the course I could do a lot more.

This is a short animation teaching mnemonics to help with spelling

words with the letter strings -ould and -ight.

Though the time I spent exceeded twenty hours,

I would recommend this course wholeheartedly.

You can see other samples of work done here.

In the past few weeks we have been working our way through

Code.org ‘s Courses for Elementary Students. 

We are doing Course Two.

As we build on our skills the things

we can do get more and more interesting.

We can find activities that suit our interests.

Bruno enjoys art and Alex prefers creating games.

Click on the screens to see the games and artwork in action.

Then click ‘run’.

Alex says: ‘Check out the game I made myself with @codeorg ‘ http://t.co/zqm98cuAGx #codeweekeu Watch out for the fireballs.

— 2ndClassR6 (@2ndClassR6) October 16, 2014

And in this game, after ‘run’, click the screen again! 

And in the blink of an eye Alex made this game @codeorg http://t.co/SnptuIFnJp #codeweekEU

— 2ndClassR6 (@2ndClassR6) October 16, 2014

Bruno made this design using http://t.co/UsiKJQ50RK http://t.co/XNcMzZlV2m codeweekEU

— 2ndClassR6 (@2ndClassR6) October 16, 2014

We are back at school a month.

Learning Scratch is really taking off.

Learning to program is proving to be a collaborative task

that involves a lot of thought and problem solving.

We have completed Code.org’s ‘An Hour of Code’

and have started Code.org’s ‘Beyond an Hour of Code’.

Today we were artists and our activity involved

calculating distances and angles. We had a good time.

It was fun and we were learning.

Photo Credit: andresmh via Compfight

Earlier this month I started to learn how to code.

I posted some links then I thought might be useful.

I took advice and decided it would be better

to start with learning ‘Scratch’

as my objective is to be able to

teach coding to my students.

Scratch seems to have excellent possibilities

for the primary classroom.

On Education Posts Message Board,

I got some very useful recommendations

and so started with the Lesson Plans on Scratch.ie

A kind young relative took pity on me

and gave me her copy of ‘Scratch2Scratch’

I supplemented this learning

with a variety of videos here and here.

I also spent some time doing

‘An Hour of Code’ on Code.org

This first hour is straightforward enough

but it revises some of the basics.

I could also see that students would

enjoy the puzzles presented during the ‘hour’.

I am very taken with the potential

of ‘Scratch’ in the classroom.

However, though I would feel confident

enough now to introduce ‘Scratch’

to class and to stay perhaps

just a step ahead of my students,

for me as a learner, it is early days yet.

UPDATE: Finding Code Club World.org excellent:

both systematic and interesting.