This December Joe’s TAG class was invited to an Hour of Code event on Edmodo's LearnStreet app. The event is designed to introduce students to computer programming using a dozen activities by several partners. The video link is from Code.org. Their goal is to interest students in computer science as a career; ours is math skills.
Day of Code began in 2011 during the same week (Computer Science Ed Week) with a goal of 20 cities. These 2 sites can give an overview. The links that follow are sites which provide tools which can be used to add coding to your students’ lives all through the year.
Tynker and Code.org both offer a course on coding simple enough for elementary students. Tynker and Scratch look alike in that they allow students to move bits around to create the “code” for animations.
Alice uses a drag and drop system of words to create animations. All are very visual you can see the immediate result of what you have done.
Creative problem solving in all these tools is a fit for computational thinking.
Since this article was written earlier this year I have also found a Google site CS First which has a ready to use 8 week after school club which teaches coding with Scratch.
