Beyond the Hour of Code

In September, Mayor DeBlasio gave New York City public schools a deadline for offering computer science to all students. With great fanfare, the December “hour of code” came and went. Then in January, President Obama announced in his state of the union address that a 4 billion dollar initiative would help “empower a generation of American students with the computer science skills they need to thrive in a digital economy.”

All this is great news. However, our curious and creative Third and Fourth graders don’t need deadlines or national initiatives  to get excited about Tech class. Thanks to the new schedule, we have two full-hour periods every 8 day cycle. This winter, the focus has been building coding skills with Scratch

Third Grade

The Third Grade challenge is to create two original creatures who must start out facing each other and then move over to meet. Together they have a conversation without interrupting one other.  Then when they are done speaking, something unexpected is supposed to happen.

Here are a couple of the Third Grade original characters who meet in their Scratch code:

Fourth Grade

Each Fourth grader builds on the coding he or she learned in Third grade by constructing a complex maze game, one stage at a time. They’re creating mazes heroes and obstacles, doors, and keys to open the doors. Eventually each game will have its own musical score. In this highly structured unit, students gain common understandings so that they can develop a foundation in basic programming and help one other revise and debug. They are also given lots of room for originality. Here are some of the themes from this year’s budding maze games:

Fourth Grade parents – stay tuned for instructions on how to download and play Fourth Grade maze games once they are complete. If in the meantime, you would like to download Scratch at home, then you’ll find instructions here.