This week is hour of code Week organized by Code.org. They are joined by almost every company that makes some type of learn-to-code product and offers short activities designed to introduce programming concepts to students of all ages.
Code.org and the hour of code The website are good places to find activities to use this week. There are other services that I like and have used to teach basic programming concepts to students. Those services are highlighted below.
MakeCode Arcade
If you really only have an hour, MakeCode Arcade hosted by Microsoft is a site you must try. At MakeCode Arcade you'll find dozens of games that students can create by following some basic programming instructions. As you can see in my demo video, MakeCode Arcade uses a drag-and-drop block programming interface. Students drag blocks together to create their programs to run their games.
WITH App Inventor
He WITH App Inventor is a free app development tool that I've used with students and teachers for over a decade. It's a great tool for introducing students to some programming concepts while also allowing them to develop apps they can actually use on their phones. While it may seem complicated at first glance, once they've mastered some basics, students can create some amazing apps through MIT App Inventor. Here is my overview of the video. how to create your first app with MIT App Inventor.
Blackbird
Blackbird is a platform that helps teachers teach programming to middle and high school students. Blackbird positions itself as a platform that fills the gap between using a block-based service like Scratch and writing code in an IDE. Blackbird does not use blocks or offer any blocks. Instead, Blackbird offers a series of interactive lessons in which students write JavaScript. Blackbird lessons are organized into progressive units. From the first lesson, students create a game that they can customize to their liking. When all the lessons are done, students can move on to a “workshop” where they can work on independent projects that they can watch from the teacher dashboard in Blackbird. You can watch an overview video of Blackbird right here.
CodePen
CodePen is a code editing environment where students can see how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work together to form web applications. In the code editor there is a column for HTML, a column for CSS, and a column for JavaScript. CodePen is a real-time editor. That means you can change any aspect of HTML, CSS, or JS and immediately see the effects of those changes in the preview panel. This is a great way to see what happens when a variable is changed in an application. If the change didn't work as expected, a quick “CTRL+Z” on your keyboard reverts you to the previous state. The same thing happens when you edit an aspect of HTML or CSS.
CodePen has a gallery of publicly shared projects that you can copy and modify. Those public projects make it easy for students to start using CodePen, as I demonstrate in this short video tutorial.
Professional development courses!
Thank you so much to everyone who signed up for one of my professional development courses last week. If you didn't sign up last week, you can still use the links below to sign up today. You can register today and finish the course whenever you want.
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