G4 Hour of Code

My first learning from this year's Hour of Code, was not to plan the lessons too early. In early November I checked out all the online apps, the Hour of Code website, and the iPad apps.  Based on all that research, I made my plan for the grade 4 classes.

Now that Hour of Code week us, there are lots more resources, the Hour of Code website has added a much different, much longer and much more diverse set of activities for elementary kids, and a number of the apps have a new offering such as Lightbot Hour of Code 2014, and Hopscotch just added a bunch of videos and projects for Hour of Code.

So, I dumped all of my previous plans and have been teaching the following lesson.

1. View the Brainpop Computer Programming video.
2. Briefly review the key vocabulary from the video which will come up in their activities, such as functions and loops.
3. Briefly discuss why we celebrate Hour of Code.
4. Sent them off to work through some of the elementary grades 3-6 activities.
5. Halfway through class we log off the computers and bring their iPads to the carpet.
6. There I introduce and give them a few minutes with each of the following iPad apps.

• Daisy the Dinosaur
• Kodable
• Lightbot Hour of Code
• Hopscotch

Even students who took part last year assure me they learned a lot this year.