Today we had another exciting opportunity to work with Ms. Durnford, who came to our class to talk about computational thinking, coding and debugging.
First, Ms. Durnford brought ingredients to make a sandwich, and asked the students to "code" her, giving step by step instructions to make the sandwich. The students quickly learned how detailed and explicit they needed to be, enjoying a few laughs along the way as the sandwich ended up inside-out, with a plastic wrapped cheese slice in the middle, and mustard everywhere!
You can try this at home by taking an everyday task, like putting cutlery on the table, or making a bowl of cereal, and having different family members "code" each other. Be warned, I hear the "code" for getting a child to clean their room, is very, VERY complicated ;)
Next, Ms. Durnford used Scratch Jr. to "code" the students, getting them to perform a sequence of 4-5 steps. After some practice, students worked in small groups to "code" each other, using the different movement blocks to create instructions.
Finally, when students showed success with task expectations, they were allowed time to explore the other features of Scratch Jr. Through collaborative exploration, they were able to discover and teach how to:
- change Sprites and backgrounds
- delete preselected Sprites
- rename Sprites
- adjust start points to have their Scratch story make sense
- add Sprites
- layer different programs for different Sprites
- create text/speech bubbles
- record voices or sounds
- edit characteristics of Sprites by changing colour and size
- loop code so action repeats
- group Sprites together so they all move together
At the end, students reflected on what they learned today, celebrating personal growth and success:
"I got better at debugging, and learned a little more about coding...like grouping Sprites, from other peoples presentations..."
"You need to use more detail in your steps when giving instructions for it to work, and people can follow the instructions in the right way..."
Thank you to Ms. Durnford for your expertise!
Have a wonderful evening everyone!
Ms. Thomas
