This is a guest post from Technology Integrationist Angie Kalthoff from District 742. Need a Mini Grant to purchase materials or try an interesting new program at your library? Apply today!
The mini grant I applied for was to purchase a variety of tools to help bring Computer Science (CS) into elementary classrooms.
I am excited to report that they were a success! I was able to purchase many board games and use them in classrooms before the end of the school year and at our local CoderDojoGRRL.
Here are a few items I would like to highlight!
I already had purchased the Robot Turtles game. Now, I was able to purchase the extension pack. Using the extension pack I am able to introduce more complex challenges as students progress through the game. In the image below, students are learning to play Robot Turtles.
Dash and Dot Learn to Code Challenge Card Set
We have sets of Dash and Dot in each of our elementary schools. Last year, I was able to work with amazing second grade teachers who created their own challenge cards which aligned to our second grade math standards. These challenge cards align with Code.org’s Computer Science Fundamentals A-F curriculum which we encourage our students to use in school and at home. The challenge cards are a great way to give kids freedom in their creation of code for Dash, while aligning them with skills they have learned about in Code.org! In this picture, we are exploring the cards at CoderDojoGRRL!
Coding Farmers is a game for kids seven and older. I used it in a first grade classroom. The goal of Coding Farmers is to “teach real programming concepts in a fun and intuitive way.” Students use cards and dice to move around the game board. A better description from their website is “action cards, which describe an action, like “move forward by two spaces” in two ways: regular English, and Java code. By playing the game several times, kids learn to connect their actions with written code. They become programming literate all while having a blast – rolling a dice, maneuvering around obstacles and chatting with their friends and family.”
