It is a big day at Kodable! For the past three years, we have been working toward one goal: making it as easy as possible to teach programming in elementary school! Now we provide a complete K-5 programming curriculum to elementary schools. The Kodable 4th and 5th grade curriculum, Bug World, is now available!
Your 4th and 5th grade students will journey with the fuzzFamily to the arid world of the bugs. They must use real JavaScript and learn about Object-Oriented Programming concepts such as Classes, Subclasses, Properties, Methods, and more!
With the release of Bug World, Kodable is now the world’s first all-inclusive programming curriculum for elementary schools taking students from learning to think like a programmer in Kindergarten to writing real code by 5th grade.
To celebrate, we’re making our 4th and 5th grade curriculum available for you to try with your students for FREE for the rest of the 2015-2016 school year!
Where this fits
Bug World is the first part of Kodable that teaches actual syntax, no blocks here! We seamlessly transition from our earlier, symbol-based lessons into JavaScript. In fact, if you look closely, you might see a few familiar things!
The Bug World lesson plans and student content we are teaching advanced concepts often included in the first semester of college for computer science students. These concepts are not out of reach for your students, however, is intended for upper elementary students, or those that already have a solid foundation in our earlier content.
Your 2nd graders having completed earlier parts of Kodable should already code on a 5th grade level.
The United States has already moved toward making coding a part of every child’s education with the recent CS for All Initiative. Bringing CS to every student has always been our goal, and our complete K-5 Programming Curriculum makes it that much easier for schools to begin teaching their students computer science in Kindergarten. By completing their study of JavaScript in 5th grade, students can explore other areas of computer science in middle and high school.
What it teaches
Our Object-Oriented Programming Curriculum teaches real computer science in a way that makes it accessible for young learners. To make this learning process as smooth as possible, we highly recommend following our lesson plans before moving to on-screen content.
We know that teaching computer science can be intimidating, but our mission has always been to make it as accessible to teachers without previous coding experience. This has never been truer than in our new content. The good news is that we’ve created some incredible resources, designed from the ground up by teachers, for teachers.
Each lesson plan includes vocabulary, learning objectives and a collaborative off-screen activity. You do not need any previous JavaScript or programming experience to teach and learn with your students.
Your students began their programming education on Smeeborg by learning about foundational coding concepts in isolation, such as:
- Sequence
- Conditions
- Loops
- Functions
- Debugging
In Asteroidia, your students learned all about Variables, including:
- Strings
- Integers
- Arrays
Our Object-Oriented programming curriculum (Bug World!) prepares students to write real, dynamic programs with actual programming syntax. Bug World revisits foundational concepts while teaching four new concepts:
- Classes
- Properties
- Subclasses
- Functions
Students will learn about these concepts off-screen and then take to their devices for independent practice. Your class will write classes, modify properties, make subclasses, and work with functions to engage in an exciting and dynamic program.
Why we chose JavaScript?
JavaScript is the most widely used language in the world, and powers virtually every website you visit. It is also the easiest language to get started with and see real results – which is incredibly powerful for captivating young learners. You and your students are going to learn an incredibly powerful technology that powers some of the biggest websites in the world, including Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix.
Improvements in JavaScript recently (specifically, ECMAScript 6) has made it a viable, and powerful teaching tool for students.
What it means for you
Our curriculum and lesson plans are available now on your teacher dashboard. As with every other concept in Kodable, we have included complete, scripted lessons that you can dive into with your students.
Feel free to give it a whirl this spring! It is available to everyone from now until June 31st, 2016.
If your school is considering implementing coding on a K-5 scale, please feel free to reach out to us (support@kodable.com) about the scope and sequence of the Kodable Curriculum We’re happy to help you determine if it can fit your goals.
