Wow, what a day! Day 4 is in the books for the Kodable Road Tour, and our sessions just keep getting better and better. On this particular day of our programming journey, we arrived in Queens, New York, where we had tons of coding fun with our good friends at the Solomon Schechter School of Queens.
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What we learned: When choosing a robot for fuzzFamily frenzy...choose wisely!
One of the unplugged activities that we have had great success with over the course of the Kodable Road Tour thus far is fuzzFamily Frenzy. This activity is a great starter activity for any grade level that is beginning to learn to code, and can be differentiated in a number of different ways to accommodate the skill levels of the students. We have covered sequence, functions, and everything in between in fuzzFamily frenzy so far on our tour, and the students have responded really well.
Students at the Solomon Schechter School were particularly impressed with fuzzFamily Frenzy, and the amazing Rebecca Simon helped us even further differentiate the activity for the benefit of the students. Often Grechen and I are the volunteer robots, but this time around Rebecca arranged for some of the more vocal and outspoken students in her class to serve as the robots in our activity. We found that this worked particularly well because even after the activity ended, these students could be reminded that they had been "coded" in a certain way, and that they had to live up to the expectations of their program. :)
This also led to a number of interesting variations of our robot program, including lots of jumping, dancing, and fist pumps.
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Plans for the future: This is only the beginning...
Solomon plans to continue with more unplugged activities, and was thrilled to hear about the new Kodable Curriculum. Rebecca is always looking for more ideas and has done an awesome job at getting more teachers at her school on-board and started coding. Be sure to follow her at @Edtechmorah to learn more about the neat stuff she is doing with coding at her school and share ideas.
Favorite Moment: What to do when the WiFi is not working?
We often talk about our greatest fear when in the classroom...and that is what to do when the WiFi is not working. For a slight moment in our visit...this fear struct all of us. However, not to worry...because we had plenty to do in the meantime! When the WiFi wasn't working we quickly moved to unplugged, shared devices, and completed Kodable lessons together. Just because a problem comes up doesn't mean that there is any reason to panic, and this experience clearly demonstrated this. Instead, it gave us a great opportunity to pair program, answer questions, and work together on a number of programming challenges.
The Kodable Road Tour is flying by! Join in on the fun by following our daily updates...and support the cause by buying an AWESOME Kodable T-Shirt. :)
