Each year for the past 6 year's Code.org plans and coordinates great things for #HourOfCode during Computer Science Week.
Almost if not every year since I've been in the library, I have tied it in to class library visits and looked for ways to help facilitate Hour of Code and coding. In recent years, I've also used it as an opportunity to bring in different Makerspace items. For example, last year students used Ozobots during Hour of Code. This year they had four options: Hour of Code activities, Tinkercad's Codeblocks, Specdrum rings, or UKit robots. Why tie makerspace into Hour of Code?
To prep, I typed up instructions to help with some of the setup steps and details. You can see those below. Also, I recognized that students wouldn't have time to both build the robots and code them, so we set to pre-building the robots. A science teacher's classes pre-built two of them, I built one to see how it works, and library aides built the remaining three. (Also to prep, I had to figure out how to number/track the Spectrum rings...but that's another story for another post.)
Here are some photos of the students in action. There are also some videos of the action on the HIJHPantherLib Instagram page.
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Last year I shared some work I did with integrating technology into different parts of our Global Read Aloud work with Refugee. This year my school read The Bridge Home by Padma Venkatraman for GRA 19.
I wanted to share the wrap up stations that I had set up in the library for students when we finished the book. Some students chose to try a few different things and some went all in on one. Some of these do require equipment/kits (i.e. Bloxels) or require a little digital setup ahead of time (i.e. Flipgrid grids), but none were labor intensive. These were the stations:
The most exciting part for me was seeing the Ozobot station going exactly how I had hoped with some students. In fact, some students exceeded my expectations! If you go to this Instagram post, you can see two videos of two different students talking me through the Ozobot path they had created with the color coded marker's to represent Viji's journey through the story. (Viji is the main character.) These videos show problem solving, analyzing literature, thinking metaphorically and symbolically, and communicating thinking! A few teachers have talked to me since about how to integrate them possible into their classroom, which is part of the goal, right? There are A LOT of reasons why I do these stations. It's intentional. But I'd be lying if I said one of the many reasons wasn't to demonstrate how hands on or technological making can tie into books and other subject areas.
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