Coding Club: Exploring TouchDevelop

This post is part of a series of entries documenting the startup of our Kids Who Code Coding Club at Hamiota Elementary.  

When we resumed coding club meetings after Christmas, I offered to introduce a new coding tool to any Grade 5 students who were interested in trying something more challenging.  I had heard a lot of good things about how middle years students were using TouchDevelop to complete tutorials and create games and I felt the Grade 5s would be successful with the added difficulty.  Unfortunately, with dozens of other students in the gym, I didn’t have a lot of time to spend directly teaching students how to get started.  I helped them get to touchdevelop.com and then suggested they begin a tutorial and try following the steps.  They were able to get started, but they had a lot of questions and needed more support from me, so we decided to have a small-group meeting on an alternate day to get them started.   The following week, the small group met on Monday and I was able to better support them in completing levels of their chosen TouchDevelop tutorial.  During our regular club meeting on Wednesday, many students chose to continue working on their tutorials (which went much better now that they’d had some support to get started.) 

The following Monday, I was surprised to see grade 5s start arriving in my classroom at lunchtime.  The first one asked “Are we working on TouchDevelop with you again today?” to which I replied “I hadn’t planned on it… did you want to work on TouchDevelop today?”  I got a firm “Yes!” Apparently, the students involved had been discussing it all morning and were eager to get back to work on their tutorials.  During this second (somewhat impromptu) meeting, I was able to help students login so that their progress would be saved and we also learned how to rename tutorials so we could keep track of who the work belonged to even though we were sharing a login.  One student even completed and published his first project!  It was exciting to see a finished project and to share it online!  Again that Wednesday, most of the students chose to continue their tutorials during our regular coding club meeting.  Another group was able to publish their finished work.  I think we’ve started something big here.   Many students joined coding club with the idea of creating games or apps and I think that TouchDevelop has the capabilities to help us meet that goal!

Coding Club: Computer Science Education Week

This post is part of a series of entries documenting the startup of our Kids Who Code Coding Club at Hamiota Elementary.  

During Computer Science Education Week, I explained the Hour of Code movement to coding club students and introduced them to the code.org tutorials.  Since we have so many members (and only one of me!) I had to get creative in order to effectively share the tutorials with students.  I wanted to make sure that students got to spend most of the time actually engaged in coding and not struggling to get started or waiting for me to help them.  Luckily, my grade 1s had already done some work that would come in handy… 

As a part of our text-type study on procedural texts, my grade 1s had written instructions for how to access the code.org tutorials.  The instructions were designed to be used by guests at the Kids Who Code Code-a-thon which my grade 1s organized to celebrate Hour of Code. Using the instructions at coding club was a great way to help students more independently access the tutorials (thus keeping me sane and ensuring that students were making good use of their time).   

The code-a-thon event we hosted was another opportunity for coding club members to experience some new coding tools.  Many of the classes in our school attended the event and had the chance to briefly try out 1 or 2 coding tools at the stations run by my grade 1 coders.  The following week, I gave all club members the choice to code with any tool they’d tried.  Many students chose to work with a tool they’d tried out at the code-a-thon, others worked on the code.org tutorials again and some picked a favourite tool that they’d learned during previous meetings.  I believe that choice is important for students and also very engaging… 50 children coding (relatively) quietly in small groups with their peers on the last Wednesday before Christmas break is pretty solid proof for me that learners are engaged.   

I have found (just as I have found in my classroom) that even if only a few students have experience with a particular coding tool, they will work together to teach each other and support each other when they run into challenges. 

 

Marvelous Muffins: Our Project

The grade 1s helped me create this video which explains their Marvelous Muffins project!

Marvelous Muffins: Fundraising Success!

With the help of some great volunteers and one of our partner classrooms, we completed our baking for the Marvelous Muffins project before spring break.  One of our jobs upon returning to class was to calculate how much money we raised.  Using base ten blocks, we counted out the number of dollars we collected from muffin orders.  Then, we "traded" some blocks so we could subtract the number of dollars we spent on groceries.  Next, we counted up the remaining blocks to find out how much money we raised.  The grade 1 class was excited to celebrate that they raised $494 to purchase school supplies for Mr. Eric's class in Ghana, Africa! 

 
Mr. Eric sent us some photos of his school and classroom so that our class could see what it is like there.  We noticed that they have the alphabet on the wall just like us and they also have tables and chairs like us.  We also noticed that they have different school supplies than us and we are excited to send them some new supplies to use in their classroom!  Our next step is selecting and ordering supplies for their classroom.

 

Marvelous Muffins: Busy Bakers

With orders rolling in, our class has been busy baking to fill orders for our Marvelous Muffins fundraiser.  Earlier this month, our class went through the March calendar and selected baking dates when the school kitchen would be available for our "bakery".  Next, the class wrote a note home to parents requesting baking volunteers.  I also added a message with the specific details and dates. 

Thankfully, I work with great families and we've had many volunteers come forth to help us with this special project!   We created a March calendar on our SMARTboard and, as we confirmed volunteers, we scheduled students to "work a shift" in the bakery.  This system has worked well because I could continue teaching lessons in the classroom while students went to the kitchen in pairs and small groups.  A few students got to bake each day and we made sure everyone got a turn over the course of the month. 

In addition to the contribution that students are making to helping others with their baking, there was also lots of learning involved.  Students were able to work with our volunteers to follow directions, read recipes, measure, count out orders and more.  It was a very big job to bake over one thousand muffins, but this group of students and volunteers tackled the task successfully. 

Our final baking day was this week and we had some guests join us to help with the project.  On one of our recent video calls to our partner classroom in Miniota, my grade 1s were excitedly sharing the details of their project.  During the call, one of the students in my class raised her hand to ask the Kindergartens a question.  She wondered if their class would like to be part of our project and invited them to come to our school to help with the baking.  I thought this was a great idea since our classes already work together virtually and it did work out that they were able to join us in person!  The Miniota Kindergartens took turns baking with us to help us fill the final orders for our fundraiser.  We are lucky to have great classroom partnerships so that we can work together and learn together!

 

Marvelous Muffins: Taking Orders

One of the steps in our Marvelous Muffins project was to create order forms.  Once we'd decided on kinds of muffins and prices, we did some shared writing to develop our order forms.  Students suggested information to include on the forms and I typed.  Since our shared work is always projected on our SMARTboard, students also proofread and suggested revisions as we developed the order forms.  When the order forms were ready, students counted out enough for each grade and sent forms home to each family in our school. 

We were very excited to see muffin orders coming in right away!  To keep track of the number of orders, we worked together as a class.  Students took turns reading aloud order forms and tallying the orders on our class chart.  After we tallied, we counted by 5s and 10s to find out how many orders we had for each kind. As more orders came in, we added to our chart and updated the totals.  It was great reading and math practice for us!   This week, we finished tallying and counting all orders.  Our school community has shown us tremendous support - check out the order tally!

Next, students wanted to calculate the total number of orders. The numbers are pretty large for grade 1 mathematicians, but before I knew it, students were putting their mental math skills to good use!  One student suggested starting with 60+40=100 and from there we continued adding up our orders using mental math.  You can see our thinking below (impressive mental math!).  Our grand total is 179 orders - that's 1074 muffins! 

Marvelous Muffins: Putting our Plan into Action

The grade 1 class has been busy putting our Marvelous Muffins plan into action so we can help our partner class in Ghana, Africa.  After determining which kinds of muffins we were going to sell based on survey results, our class started to read muffin recipes.  We read recipes and discussed the variations in recipe size and ingredients.  Since I've never made chocolate chip muffins, I decided to test out a recipe at home and surprise the class with a batch of muffins to taste test.  We determined that the recipe was tasty, so we decided to use it for our baking.

Once we had selected our recipes, our next job was to write a list of ingredients that we would need.  Using SMARTnotebook, I was able to display the recipe and a blank slide side-by-side on our SMARTboard.  We read through the recipe together and each time we read a new ingredient, a student added the item to our list.  Next, we went through the ingredients we already had and narrowed down the list to create a list of groceries we needed to buy. 

Our class took a walking field trip to the grocery store to purchase the groceries.  Students worked together to push the cart, keep track of items on the grocery list, load groceries, unload groceries and carry groceries.