1st Grade, 7th Grade and 8th Grade got their first chance to participate in The Hour of Code today and we were trying lots of things in the lab that we’ve never done before!

1st Grade

Once I decided to have all grades participate in The Hour of Code, I knew that I wanted to use an iPad app with Kindergarten and 1st Grade. The problem was, we don’t have iPads at school – well other than some of the teachers’ personal ones. So, I set out to borrow enough that we could have an iPad available for each pair of students and YAY! we got enough for this to happen. Thank you so much to our school secretary, Mrs. Wright, Ian’s mom, and Diya’s mom for loaning their iPads for The Hour of Code.

1st Grade (and Kindergarten and 2nd, too) have been doing some pre-coding activities with Bee-Bot since the beginning of the year so the day started out talking about what programmers do and how they have been programming Bee-Bot. After this introduction, I told 1st Grade the story of the fuzzFamily and how they came to be on the planet Smeeborg and explained what they were going to do to help them explore the planet. Then it was time to try out Kodable! Oh what fun and great excitement when everyone got past the “pink” level as they called it. I am excited to see how far they will get in the app when they return for more on Thursday.

7th Grade

7th Grade watched The Hour of Code introduction video and discussed what coding is. They were then introduced to  MIT App Inventor and got to work programming their very first Android app! Everyone completed their app (even though bringing up the emulator is extremely slow) and will continue with the second version of the app on Friday when we should have at least one Android device to test them on. Fingers crossed that we can get this working (since it will have to be using a USB connection I think) – this should be great fun if it works!

8th Grade

8th Grade’s class started with watching The Hour of Code introduction video and discussing what coding is. After this, the students were introduced to TouchDevelop. Our school has a no personal devices policy for students but the 8th graders were allowed to bring in their devices to use during their Hour of Code development. Half of them did bring in their devices though a couple of the students ended up using the computer instead of their device when they actually started to create their apps. It will be interesting to see who continues to use devices and who else may bring their device on Friday when they’re back in the lab for more. By the end of the class, we had a few completed apps and others who were almost done. Friday’s class will start off with a demo of some of the apps and they’ll be shared on this blog and the student’s Google sites once the week is over.

Now it’s on to Day 3 with Kindergarten, 4th Grade and more MIT App Inventor with 6th Grade.