All of the third grade teachers at Southern Pines Elementary School are excited that their students are learning how to code!
Mrs. Sheats, Mrs. Shoemaker, Mrs. Croft-Lashley, Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Kohut, and Mrs. Pairmore have been participating in a rotation station where their students learn basic pseudocode and then apply that knowledge to actual computer programming languages!
It all started with CodeMonkey - A video-game activity where students learn pseudocode, a type of slang coding language, which allows a cartoon monkey to catch a banana.
Pseudocode Example:
Real computer programmers use pseudocode all the time when they are planning out their programs.
We decided to act this out using real rulers and multiplication to write some of our own pseudocode.
Then, students enjoyed the CodeMonkey Program!
This was only the beginning...
Students moved on to creating rectangles with turtle in Python!
Students automatically made a connection between the angles from CodeMonkey and the angles in their Python Code!
Students became problem solvers by learning about bugs! Ava, a third grader, said, "There are so many bugs in my code I need to call an exterminator!"
They even helped their peers think things through!
The adventure continued with coding shapes on an imaginary number line using the Racket Programming Language and the wescheme.org platform!
All video games have an imaginary coordinate plane behind them. Third graders are beginning to understand the concept of a number line. How would a rectangle look on a number line?
OR
While coding with Racket, students learned that the order of their numbers represented the position of the shape on a number line.
The computer science endeavor continues with learning about binary numbers, algorithms, loops, the parts of a computer, and the basics of computer science using the children's book:
"Hello Ruby."
... and on to 4th grade too!
Happy Coding!
No comments:
Post a Comment