Coding Books 2

It bills itself as “The Complete Middle School Study Guide” and it does have a load of content.

Everything you need to ace computer science and coding in one big fat notebook is a fat book full of color drawings that covers coding concepts and computer languages.

I used it to teach Scratch. I like how it explains the coordinate plane, because not ever student knows what the numbers in the move blocks mean.

I also learned about the scratch backpack, on area on the bottom of the scratch page that you can use to save scripts to reuse with other sprites (characters) or other projects. Students must have an individual Scratch account to use the backpack feature, fyi.

The book has a unit on universal coding commands, such as loops, conditionals, and variables, that I found confusing and not helpful.

Image

The Foos

This class of students worked together on the smartboard to solve the Foos puzzles.

We all got stuck on one, and even the paras gave it a try. We had to make use of the Repeat block and we could not figure it out.

To be continued next week!

Word Coding

In this activity, students use N(orth), S(outh), E(ast) and W(est) arrows to spell words off a letter grid.

For example, “JUMP” is E, E, E, S.

 

In this example, “ABOVE” is S, S, E, S, E

 

After doing several examples, give students a code (e.g., S, S, E, S, E) and let them figure out what word it spells!

Remember to specify the starting box (which is typically the upper left-most cell — like in a spreadsheet)

May 2024
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031