Programming Day – Sept 13th

So many teaching ideas come from looking at the site days of the year celebrated around the world. Sept 13th has many things to acknowledge including Roald Dahl Day – a number one author for children’s books. However, for my ICT subjects it is interesting to see that it is also Programming Day. As we are in remote learning, we will do the following activities to acknowledge them.

1. Listen to Code Anthem a song on Code or Java Script Rap as students entered the MS Teams live meeting
2. Walk through the days of the year for September 13th
3. Watch Roald Dahl and the trailer on the Witches by Roald Dahl on Flipgrid
4. Looked at the days commemorated on the weekend which included 20 years since 9/11
5. Sign up for code.org
6. Complete the dance party challenge. https://code.org/dance after watching the introductory video
7. “Keep on dancing” at   https://studio.code.org/s/dance-extras-2019/lessons/1/levels/1 or Flappy Game at https://studio.code.org/flappy/1 or any other of the options at the bottom of https://code.org/hourofcode/overview

Reflections on the success of this lesson:-

I tried this with year 7 and 9 and 10. The 9/10 students enjoyed the rap songs and were quite interactive in their knowledge of 9/11. This was a topic of high interest to them. They were interactive in the chat talking about the Roald Dahl books that they had read and the movies that they had seen. Year 7s really enjoyed coding the Dance Party. I enabled them as presenters and some showed the dance moves that they had created to the rest of the class by sharing their screens. Here is an example of one of the student’s dance party coding.

Year 9/10 – one of the students at home, had trouble with level 9 of the dance party. I asked him to return to the live meeting where one of the boys (who is new to our school and just come out from New Zealand) was actually learning at school. I was home. To my amazement, Harby (who was at home) shared his screen with me (I was home) and Matthew (who was at school) and Matthew pointed out the errors in his programming, stepped him through with Harby successfully completing the whole course. Such wonderful collaboration on a remote scale.