We got off to a great start in Code Club yesterday, where students jumped in and started coding right away.
We were very impressed with their engagement and the enthusiasm they brought to the projects.
Yesterday students worked with partners on using Scratch to tell a joke. Since all of the Scratch work is online, the students can show you their work from home. They should go to http://scratch.mit.edu and then log in (upper right) with the username and password you created. We created accounts with some students yesterday, in which case we’ll send out the log in credentials via email.
After logging in, choose my stuff from the menu under the username (again, upper right). From this screen you can see all of the projects. If their work from class is not there, it might be posted under their partner’s name. Links to student Scratch pages are available on our roster. Additionally, we are adding “jokes” to our Scratch Knock Knock Jokes Studio.
If your young programmer wants to get some extra coding in at home, they can continue working on their project or create a new joke, based on our basic template or more advanced template. To work from these (or other) templates, they should click See Inside and then choose Remix. Next week in class we will finish our jokes by adding motion, changing the look, and (for advanced students) refactoring our code with variables and custom blocks.
Lastly, we have set up a Slack team to help with communications outside of class. Slack is multi-user chat where we can share links, ask for help, and talk to each other. Specifically, if the kids are working on something at home and get stuck or can’t find what they’re looking for, Slack is a good place to ask for help. I invited everyone who has provided a contact email for the class. If others want to join the conversation, they can send an email to matt@curinga.com.