Hour of Code

So if you haven't done the Hour of Code with your class yet, you still have one more school day to get it done! This has been such an amazing experience to share with my students!  My original plan was to have my students participate yesterday, but the silly ice kept us home!  Today I did it with both my classes and I can't remember the last time, my kids were this engaged for an entire hour!  It took them a little while to get the hang of the coding thing, but once they did, they didn't want to log off of their laptops!

 This puzzle stumped a lot of my kids!

I will share a couple of my insights having done it now.

1. Make sure you do at least some of the coding before your kids.  It's really helpful to know what to do right.  Just like having a key for a test before giving it.
2. If you want your students to do more than an hour, they need to create an account that will save their work and track how many lines of code they've written.
3. Writing code involves a lot of reading.  I had several kids who would just click okay when a screen popped up telling them what to try instead of reading what it said.
4. It sometimes helps to actually have them do the movements with their body to see what needs to happen.
5.Your kids will love this!

After I did my hour, I came home to code some more because some of my kids completed more than I had in class and I couldn't help them anymore.  My little one sat in my lap for 20 minutes watching while I drew triangles and squares with code!  You are never too young to code!