Westwood High School Students Introduce Coding to Purple Sage Students

The Wednesday of Hour of Code Week, three Westwood students came with their sponsor, Christie Fennewald, the Instructional Technology Specialist at WWHS, to Purple Sage Elementary at the beginning of the elementary day to introduce Coding to 2nd and 5th graders.  They used Tynker.com with the Candy Quest game, and Code.org with the Frozen game.  It was a great experience to learn a new language and have great high school students as their mentors.  The students were truly involved in their learning.

One Hour of Code

Monday Purple Sage started their Week of "Hour of Code."  Ms. Mooney's kindergartners were introduced to Coding with the millions of other students around the world.  Our plans were to use Code.org but when that crashed due to the large numbers of participants, we moved to Tynker and used the game Candy Quest.  The students were 100% engaged, loving every minute, and were hugging Mrs. Barnard, our ITS, when they saw her later in the day!  Your students might be begging for computer time at home.  The links are on the Purple Sage website on the students' tab under Science.

Then, later, Mrs. Barnard, our ITS, introduced coding to 4th graders in Ms. Robinson's class.  They were able to use code.org and the "Frozen" tutorial to make snowflakes.  If fit nicely with their math unit with angles.  They were able to see the affect of a 36 degree angle versus a 120 degree angle.

The Hour of Code week is aiming for 100 million participants worldwide to prove that there is a demand for  21st century computer science education.  Think in your everyday life what all needs a computer scientist to build them:  a traffic light, a cell phone, a microwave, as well as the computer. The students were communicating together to problem solve, and using logic and creativity each step of the process.  We saw adding, subtracting, patterning, using geometry all in an hour or coding, and it was fun and engaging!