The Hour of Code will be part of Computer Science Education Week (Dec. 4-10, 2017). Hour of Code is one of the great things that will go on that week to promote computer science in education. There's a part of computer science education that doesn't require a computer at all! Some call it "unplugged" computer science. I call it FUN!
I am a Star Wars fan. That's an understatement, but not important to this post. 😀 I take that back! The "P" in "Teach Like a Pirate" stands for PASSION. When our passions and our teaching come together it's a recipe for a great lesson! ☠j
Because of my love of Star Wars I wanted to focus on the fun BB-8 coding activities that are at https://code.org/starwars (we coded with the "block" version, not "Java Script"). Before the students ever touched the Chromebooks we had to get our minds thinking about how we would be able to CODE BB-8's moves to make it to the next level so we played a game to get our brains thinking about coding. The game helped us work on that thinking. It consisted of a board that resembles the scene in the online coding game (a desert) and some cut out game pieces. I put a grid over the desert image so that there were specific squares for making moves.
Have fun coding! I think there's so much fun we can have as we build the thinking that students need for computer science! 🤖
-Monica Spillman (@mospillman on Twitter)
Useful links:
https://csedweek.org/ https://csfirst.withgoogle.com/en/home
