More Than an Hour of Code
This week is Hour of Code week organized by Code.org. They’re joined by just about every company that makes some kind of learn-to-code product in offering short activities designed to introduce programming concepts to students of all ages.
Code.org and the Hour of Code website are fine places to find activities to use this week. There are some other services that I like that I’ve used to teach programming basics to students. Those services are highlighted below.
MakeCode Arcade
If you really have just one hour, MakeCode Arcade hosted by Microsoft is a must-try site. On MakeCode Arcade you’ll find dozens of games that students can create by following some basic programming instructions. As you can see in my demonstration video, MakeCode Arcade uses a drag-and-drop block programming interface. Students drag blocks together to create their programs to run their games.
MIT App Inventor
The MIT App Inventor is a free app development tool that I’ve used with students and teachers for over a decade now. It’s a great tool to use to introduce students to some programming concepts while letting them develop apps that they can actually use on their phones. While it might seem complicated at first glance, after they have mastered a few basic concepts students can create some amazing applications through the MIT App Inventor. Here’s my video overview of how to create your first app with the MIT App Inventor.
Blackbird
Blackbird is a platform that helps teachers teach programming to middle school and high school students. Blackbird positions itself as a platform that fills the gap between using a blocks-based service like Scratch and writing code in an IDE. Blackbird doesn’t use blocks or even offer any blocks. Instead, Blackbird provides a series of interactive lessons in which students write JavaScript. Blackbird lessons are arranged in progressive units. From the first lesson students are building a game they can customize to their heart’s content. When they’ve finished all of the lessons students can move onto a “workshop” where they can work on independent projects that you can observe from your teacher dashboard in Blackbird. You can see a video overview of Blackbird right here.
CodePen
CodePen is a code editing environment in which students can see how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work together to form web applications. In the code editor there’s a column for HTML, a column for CSS, and a column for JavaScript. CodePen is a real-time editor. That means you can change any aspect of the HTML, CSS, or JS and immediately see the effects of those changes in the preview panel. This is a great way to see what happens when a variable is changed in an application. If the change didn’t work as anticipated, a quick “CTRL+Z” on your keyboard reverts it back to the previous state. The same is true when you edit an aspect of the HTML or CSS.
CodePen does have a gallery of publicly shared projects that you can copy and modify. Those public projects make it easy for students to get started using CodePen as I demonstrate in this short tutorial video.
Professional Development Courses!
A big thank you to everyone who enrolled in on of my professional development courses last week. If you didn’t enroll last week, you can still use the links below enroll today. You can register today and finish the course whenever you like.