Coding in the Classroom

6:38 AM

Computer Science is growing more and more popular and there is a great push for it in schools. You can read more about President Obama's push for Computer Science For All here. That being said, here are some of my favorite tools to get students involved in Computer Science through coding. There are so many great sites out there, but these are my tried and true that my students LOVE.


This is one of my favorite videos to show that coding is really a skill that EVERYONE should know! Show this before you code if your students {or yourself} are hesitant about coding.



Elementary
Code.org - code with drag and drop coding; elementary age activities that are easy for students to complete (Star Wars, Minecraft, Frozen, Angry Birds, or Flappy Bird)
**There are also great unplugged lessons to introduce code to younger students without the use of computers or if you don't have computers in your classroom

Scratch - drag and drop blocks and sprite creation (create your name, or operate a "sprite")


Middle School
Code Combat - Learn how to code through gaming and web/game development

Scratch - see above :)

Code.org - For MS students, there are 20 hour long courses that start with drag and drop blocks and end with students creating their own codes from scratch.

High School
Codecademy offers a ton of different courses from Java coding all the way to web design. As a teacher, you can assign usernames and passwords to your students and you can monitor how they are doing on each section. Lessons begin easy and work step by step until your students are coding on their own with little effort.




Code HS offers a variety of different coding courses (pictured below) with the opportunity for students to move past drag and drop coding and into text based coding. There are both Java and Python options. There are checkpoint quizzes for you to see how students are doing, and as a teacher you can see the solutions and give feedback for each problem.

MIT App Inventor offers this program completely free to student use and there are a ton of resources that you can use to get your students coding here with little prep. The great thing about MIT App Inventor is that they are building REAL APPS that they can download onto any of their android devices and actually play.

Here's to finding a way to involve Computer Science in your classroom,
Hilary @ Mrs. Tech

by Hilary

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2 comments

  1. Thank you for sharing! It's amazing the technology that is available for kids to learn coding! I worked at an elementary school that had a LEGO coding club. The kids LOVED it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Isn't it amazing!? And we are currently only skimming the surface of what all will be available to our students in the future!

    ReplyDelete

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