Coding Fever Takes Over the Lower and Intermediate School

This past week, students in Junior Kindergarten through 5th grade participated in Hour of Code for the fifth consecutive year. While the Integrated Learning and Information Science (ILIS) Department already works with our teachers to incorporate coding and computer sciences into Parker’s curriculum, they used this week to highlight previously learned concepts by choosing activities that tie directly to ongoing projects and other ILIS programming.

 

The ILIS department worked with Kindergarten teachers to reinforce and introduce to JK (and reintroduce to SK) coding and robotics. Specifically, the focus was on tying in coding concepts with literacy. The students read a story together with a teacher, then broke up into groups to program various robots to re-tell the story with a focus on beginning, middle and end. JKers and SKers coded the following robots: Beebot, Mouse, Cubetto and Ozobot. In 1st and 2nd grades, Parker used websites the Hour of Code developed specifically with younger students in mind. These Hour of Code tutorials are engaging, intuitive and fun. In 3rd grade, students received another special mission from Agent X to work with robots and coding. They built a maze and coded their Dash Robot to move through the maze. Finally, students in 4th and 5th grades worked in the computer lab on a coding and literacy project using Scratch to code story scenes from books they had read.

 

This program started as a one-hour introduction to computer science, specifically designed to demystify “code,” to show that anybody can learn the basics and to broaden participation in the field of computer science. It has since become a worldwide effort to celebrate computer science, starting with one-hour coding activities and expanding to all sorts of community efforts. This grassroots campaign is currently supported by more than 400 partners and 200,000 educators worldwide. Parker is very proud to continue our participation in the Hour of Code and to be one of these partner organizations.

Click here for photos from this week of coding.