This is an 18 minute video tutorial for my 1st and 2nd grade coding club students, demonstrating how to use the draw tools in Scratch Jr (for iPad) and add some basic blocks to make characters (sprites) interact. This is based on a lesson included in the book, “The Official ScratchJr Book: Help Your Kids … Continue reading Build a Snowman in Scratch JR
This past year PBS Kids worked with the MIT Lifelong Kindergarten Group to create an awesome PBS Scratch Jr App for the iPad. Students love creating stories and games with familiar PBS Kids characters. We ended the year with a fantastic series of Passion Projects. These projects allowed students to select a topic of personal … Continue reading PBS Scratch Jr Coding Passion Project
I love science fiction and space exploration. Some of my earliest memories watching television were Star Trek episodes. In 4th grade growing up in Lubbock, Texas, I got a television for my own bedroom. It was small and black and white! That was around 1975. I remember watching Star Trek, staying up late, and the … Continue reading Science Fiction and Space Exploration
The past three years I have enjoyed bringing coding skills using Edison robots together with our elementary science curriculum. In this post, I want to share a little “window” into our learning from our culminating unit in 3rd Grade STEM class on biomimicry and animals. “Biomimicry Robots with Edison” (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer This is a … Continue reading Biomimicry Robots with Edison
On Fridays this year, my third grade STEM students have opportunities to develop their coding skills using Edison robots. Over the years, in addition to Edison, I have used BeeBot robots, Thymio robots, and the Dash robot in after-school coding clubs as well as summer coding camps. I love the ways EdScratch and the Edison … Continue reading Edison Robot Coding
One of my passions is helping students love coding. I love opportunities in the summer to lead camps which allow me to build relationships with students outside my ‘normal’ academic grade level (3rd grade) at Casady School. Last week, I led a camp for rising kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade students, called “Adventures in Coding” … Continue reading Adventures in Coding Summer Camp
Today in day 2 of our holiday robotics camp for 2nd through 5th graders, students started writing code for their Edison Robots using EdBlocks. Like Scratch Junior, EdBlocks is a simplified, block-based coding language which allows younger students (ages 7-12) to program and control a robot. Yesterday, students started by using Barcode Programming. By advancing … Continue reading Coding Edison Robots with EdBlocks
This Christmas break, my friend Michaela Freeland (@_mfreeland) and I decided to offer a two day, morning robotics camp for students in our lower and middle divisions. We opened registration up to 2nd through 6th grade students, and ended up with 11 students ranging in age from 7 to 11. 9 are girls and 3 … Continue reading Winter Break Edison Robotics Camp
This semester instead of coding classes, I am teaching two after school classes for 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders on creating stopmotion movies. We are using iPads for stopmotion. In this post I’ll share about the apps we are using and some of our lessons learned. “Stop Motion Movie Making” (CC BY 2.0) by shellyfryer We have … Continue reading Stopmotion Movie Making
This past week I led two coding camps. Both were 4 day camps, which lasted 3 hours each day. The morning session was for 1st through 3rd graders, and the afternoon session was for 4th and 5th graders. A few of the students had participated in my Spring 2018 after-school Scratch Club, but most were … Continue reading Great Week of Coding Camps with Elementary Students