Revisiting Hour of Code™

"Ms. Ehll, I went home and coded last night!"  This makes me so HAPPY that my students participated in Hour of Code for Computer Science Education Week  (December 7th-13th)!  My previous post talked about my students visiting sites, such as Code.org, and following self-directed tutorials.  

I expected a high degree of engagement and they were more than willing to abide.  (It might have helped that I mentioned how President Obama learned a line of code...) They were very focused on trying to understand how to code and even those who struggled would ask for help or ask if I could direct them to a simpler coding program.

Benefits from this week of code:
1. Engagement
2. Exposure to computer science/coding language
3. Perseverance with new concept
4. Collaboration...helping each other and paired programming (two work on same code)
5. Excitement (word spread about what was happening in library)
6. Beyond the classroom extension

The wheels are a churnin' in my head about how this Hour of Code initiative can be expanded upon next year...