Coding: The Grand Finale!

Students in grades 3-5 spent the month of September learning to read and write computer code.  For our final project, each student created a storyboard for a story idea they had.  The storyboard included a title, setting, characters, and the elements of plot: beginning, rising action to set up the problem, climax or problem, falling action or resolution, and a conclusion.  After the storyboard was completed, students used the Alice program to write the lines of code to animate their story.  Finally, students will present their storyboards and animations to a small group of classmates next week.  This has been an amazing learning experience for these kids!

Advanced Coding

Grades 3-5 are in the final stages of our dedicated month of coding.  They have come so far!  In these last few sessions, the students are working with a program called Alice, which is a free, web-based program that is provided by Carnegie Mellon University.  http://www.alice.org/index.php
Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.
In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

Our more advanced code students have moved to light-bot.  It is a little more challenging!
http://light-bot.com/hoc.html

Welcome to Tinker, Echo the Gecko!

Echo is a leopard gecko.  Echo is still a baby.  This class pet and all the necessary equipment to provide for it was purchased primarily with grant funds from Pets in the Classroom and PetSmart. (THANK YOU!!!!) Without the grant covering $120 of the first $180 of the cost of this pet, it would not be possible for all of the Tinker students to have the opportunity to learn about this reptile up-close.  Next month, we will explore the differences between vertebrates and invertebrates with Echo's help!