Interested in coding.......these kids are!

"Can we play on the code thing?" 

 "I have 30 lines of code!"
  "Can we work on one together?"  

from: code.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKIu9yen5nc

These kids are really excited about having the opportunity to learn some of the basics of coding. 

It started when one of my students wanted to make a game for kids for his genius hour project.  To help him, I found the app called Hopscotch and put it on all of the kids ipads.  

Two months later I have found that the majority of students were on the app or were sneaking on the app to play.  Due to their curiosity, I knew it was time that I jumped into it too!  Not such a bad thing!  I found they were looking at work that other kids had already made verses making their own work using codes they created. They just need to learn how as the interest was completely there.

I gave them a 40 minute block to investigate on create mode verses look at other students' work, they were making all kinds of lines and movements, but didn't really know what they were doing. They were excited about creating a line that could make something move or create a circle that would appear. I found it a great start.   

code.org is a great site that takes kids through the steps of how to code.  They sign up and play, then it goes through the basic concepts with a drag and drop program.  It is a game-like self directed tutorial that uses Angry Birds to teach students to learn how to repeat, loop, conditionals and the basic algorithms of coding in 20 mini activities.  It took our class about an hour.  After using this to teach kid the basics, they were then more successful with the app Hopscotch. 

I just love using kids curiosity to foster this type of learning.  It's easy when their excitement is encouraged by one another, I just have to give them the tools. :)