Planning for One Hour of Code

Next week is Computer Science Education Week.  To celebrate the week, people all over the country are holding a "One Hour of Code" event.

In reading about this event, I have learned that 90% of schools in the US do not offer any type of Computer Science courses.  Only 5% of students in the US take computer science courses.  There is a huge gap between the number of jobs available in the computing field and the number of people skilled to do them.  I read somewhere that for every three computing jobs available, there is only one person qualified to do it!

Since so many of us are so connected to our devices, it seems wrong that there is such little interest in learning what makes them work!  I teach in a 1 to 1 technology environment.  My students are glued to the iPad and glued to their cellphones.  We are constantly plugged in and connected to the world around us, but very few people know what's going on behind the scenes.

 After reading about the event, I decided that we need to hold our own event in Waukesha.  Dan Pochinski (a teacher from Waukesha West High School) and I decided to organize our own event.

We will be holding our event on Thursday, from 3:30 until 4:30.  During our event we will watch the intro video created by the founders of code.org.

After we watch the video, our plan is to go through a short "unplugged" activity where students get to think about all the steps of coding, without knowing how to code.  I did some digging around online and found an activity called "Harold the Robot".  For this activity I will bring along a bunch of blocks.  The goal is to have the students give me commands that will make me build a tower.  

When this activity begins I will not tell the students what the commands are.  They will have to try to give me instructions.  The instructions include:

• Move your hand to the right
• Move your hand to the left
• Move your hand forward
• Move your hand backward
• Move your hand up
• Move your hand down
• Grab the block
• Release the block

The goal is to get students to start thinking about how to give commands and how to order them.

After this introductory activity is over, we will split the students into two groups.  One group will look at MIT's APP inventor.  Students will create a working Android app called "Hello Purr" that puts a picture of a cat on the screen.  When you touch the picture, the cat will purr.

The second group will look at Google's Blockly Maze demo.  This demo includes 10 mazes of increasing difficulty.  Students are able to explore simple commands, decision making structures, and looping structures all in a graphic-based computer programming format.

I am very excited to share One Hour of Code with the students in Waukesha.  I hope they will enjoy coding as much as I do!