Coding

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Some samples of ‘Scratch’ projects for use with 2nd – 6th to teach programming.

‘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.

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A Short Review: Learning ‘Scratch’ with CPD College Ireland (Online Summer Course)

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.

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#Symbaloo webmix ‘Learning to Code’: Resources suitable for Junior Infants to Sixth+ approximately.

This year a number of students 

learned how to code.

 

The youngest students to do this were five.

They enjoyed learning using

‘The Foos’

and Code.org Course 1 and 2.

 

The older students used

Code.org Course 3 and 4.

They also enjoyed learning using 

exercises on the themes of

Frozen,

Big Hero 6,

Flappy Birds

Angry Birds

and they worked on

Code Combat,

Google’s ‘Made with Code’

and Scratch.

When student learned how to code successfully
 
then they taught other students how to code.
 
Through their teaching they showed
 
they really understood what to do.
 
When students learn to code they are

problem solving, testing, debugging, predicting

and they are learning how to think.

 

They experience success

and this is rewarding and motivating.

 

Here is a Symbaloo webmix of the websites

we used when learning to code.