Hands Up!
The big excitement this week (ok maybe it wasn't THAT exciting) was that you can now raise your hand in a Teams meeting! When students want to add to the discussion, it can be hard because we can't see everybody at once. Now there is a 'hand' icon that you can select which allows everyone to see that your hand is up. Neat. We were also able to see more than 4 people at one time, which was great.Getting Creative
Each week in our Teams classes we do a short game. This week we played 'When Suddenly...', a storytelling activity where we each take turns adding to the story. You have to listen well to what others have already said, and carry the story forward. We had some very interesting and fun stories!Scratch
The students have all been creating in Scratch and picking up new coding skills. Please check out our Studio here. Click on any of the projects to try them out. You can go full screen and you can also select the 'See Inside' button to see the computer programming that went into creating each project. Many of the projects make great use of audio, so don't mute your mics! Some of the projects are complete and others are still in progress.During our Teams classes students have sought help on how accomplish different tasks in their programs and they've shared successes. Some resources that were shared this week:
- Tutorials -- the Scratch site has tutorials on how to animate a sprite, make your own Pong game and much more. You can access the tutorials here.
- The question was asked: how do I end a game when a specific number of points is reached? This page offers some ways to approach the problem.
Lesson Slides
Below are the lesson slides for this week, in case there is anything students or parents would like to refer to (link).For Next Week
I've asked the students to continue to explore Scratch. If they have a larger project they've been working on, great, they can continue to add to it. If they would like to try some of the other activities that I've loaded in CS First they can do that, or they can check out the Scratch tutorials mentioned above and try something from there. The key is to learn some more coding skills and have fun :-)Next week we will have our last class for this year. Normally we'd have an in class celebration with goodies, but alas, not this year. I've suggested the students celebrate though by wearing something 'suitable' -- a crazy costume, goofy wig or glasses. If dressing up is not their thing, how about bringing along a favourite stuffy or item to add to the celebratory vibe.
