Family Game Night? No, Family Code Night!

This week in #edtc300 we were tasked with doing an hour of code so of course I made my mom and younger sister do it along with me!

Step One: Pick an Hour of Code Activity

After heading over to https://hourofcode.com/ca/learn we started searching for which activity we wanted to do. My sister quickly picked the “Make a Flappy Bird Game” activity and my mom had quickly selected the “Play, Design & Code Retro Arcade Games” activity. However, I had trouble deciding which one I wanted to do – there were just SO MANY options.

By the time I had finally decided to do the “The Grinch: Saving Christmas with Code” activity, my sister was already done making her flappy bird game (she called it “the 15 minutes of code”) and decided to move on to the “Minecraft Hour of Code” activity. Also in that time my mom had switched from the retro games activity to the flappy bird activity.

Step Two: Actually Do The Selected Activity

The beginning of this coding activity was smooth sailing (as one would hope considering it is for elementary students)! However, once I got to step eight, things got a little bit complicated – I had the coding right BUT I couldn’t pass the level! You can watch this screen recording of me struggling for proof.

I eventually realized what I was doing wrong in the level, I thought after I picked up Max that the sleigh was stopped (because the nothing on the screen looked like the was motion) so then I would speed up to get going again which left me no time to slow to a stop. Thankfully, I got it figured out and could pass the level to move onto the next steps.

Thankfully, the rest of the steps continued to go smoothly! Here are some screen shots of a little bit of the process:

The very last step was to create your own level of the game. You can watch the screen recording below to see the coding and watch me play my level!

After I was done coding my game my mom, sister, and I all played each other’s games. Here is a screen recording or me playing my mom’s game. I liked that the flappy bird game was easy to share with people.

Step 3: Reflection

I really liked doing the hour of code! I personally enjoyed how it was broken up into easily achievable steps rather than me just having to fend for myself. My mom also enjoyed this aspect of the hour of code. However, my sister on the other hand would have liked experimenting on a software like Scratch better (which I told her she could try instead). My sister had just recently done some coding in school so she was also a couple steps ahead of my mom and I.

Coding in the Classroom

I had never really given much thought about the student benefits of coding before this year. One of the biggest game changers for me was a PD event I attended with SaskCode. It was at that event where I realized all the different curricular connections and possibilities with coding. SaskCode has different robots for many different age groups including:

• Robot Mouse (Grades K-2)
• Ozobot (Grades 3-4)
• Edison (Grades 5-6)
• Microbit (Grades 5-6)
• Tinkercad (Grades 5-9)
• Arduino (Grades 7-12)

On the links to each of the different robots, SaskCode provides examples of possible activities as well as the curricular connections. Just looking through a few of these examples really makes you see just how many ways coding can connect to the curriculum, which really isn’t something I previously realized. It always seems like just a computer science thing.

I thought it was so cool thinking about the possibility of a hands-on experiential learning way for students to learn coding. I always thought it would have to be students sitting at a computer and doing something similar to the hour of code activity I did this week. Overall, I think that coding has importance in the lives of students, especially in the digital age we are in. There are so many different uses for coding and it offers a possible new avenue for students to demonstrate learning because they could code instead of draw or write. So, to simply wrap up my thoughts, I would give coding two thumbs up!