5th Grade Coding with Scratch
Computer Science Education week is coming up (Dec 9-15) and the goal is to give students the opportunity to practice coding and computer programming in a fun, simple way. The motive behind it is that computer programming jobs continue to be in high demand, but few students are exposed to writing code in school. So the Computer Science Education Week website has a cool video of famous people talking about the importance of learning code and they give ideas for teaching an Hour of Code in school. The teachers at Davis Elementary want to participate in the Hour of Code, so I’ve been introducing them to a kid-friendly program developed by MIT called Scratch. It’s already installed on the student computers. Today I was showing the fifth graders in Ms. Elsea’s class how to use it. First I showed them a sample I created here. It’s not super exciting, but it shows how Scratch can not only animate, but it can take user inputs and do calculations. I gave the students about 5 minutes to just explore the program and they caught on very quickly. Next I gave them a task to program the cat to make a square. I told them to be as succinct and efficient with their code as possible. Maggie’s code won because she figured out how to make a square in just 7 lines of code. On the link you can click the “See inside” button to see the code she used. Some of the students went on and made their cats speak, sing, or even change colors. Take a look at Bowen’s code to see what I’m talking about. If students can do that in just one hour, imagine what they can do with more practice. I heard a couple of students say they were going to download Scratch at home, so I look forward to seeing what they create!