March 1, 2020
One part of our (my campus is working on it together) innovation plan is to host two evening coding events this year. Our first event was a district wide Hour of Code night on December 9, 2019. At this event, we had different stations for our participants to choose from including: Ozobots, Cubelets, iPad coding, Clips, AR, desktop coding, Sphero challenge and a Sphero maze. About 30 people attended the event, including students from our elementary, middle and high schools, parents, our superintendent and our school board president.
Ideas for our stations came from many different sources. Our elementary students use Ozobots and Cubelets in an after school program. The AR station was similar to the AR activity we did in the Creative Lab at the Leadership and Learning Acdemy, while the Clips, Sphero and iPad coding activities used resources we learned at the Apple Teacher Academy. Finally we used Hour of Code resources for the desktop computer activity.
Participants were free to choose any station and move from station to station at will. Though we had originally designed a Sphero maze, participants took initiative and changed it into Sphero races. This showed creative thinking and the ability to design their own learning. Students also switched roles and became the teachers as they showed their parents and other adults how to use the Cubelets. I was one of the adults on the receiving end of this education and it was fun to see how excited the students were to show me how the different Cubelet parts worked together to make a moving object.
One of the highlights of the event was seeing the wonder and awe of learning coding from one of our youngest participants (see the first photo below). Another was watching the middle school students who are enrolled in the CS class, move from station to station and then gravitate back to the iPads to write code.
Our challenge moving forward is to provide opportunities for students to experience computational thinking. One way we can do that is to increase participation from students, parents and staff at our evening coding events.
Sandra Negro 