Hour of Code

On Monday and Tuesday this week, our Year 4, 5 & 6 classes participated in a world-wide event called the Hour of Code.  The Hour of Code is a global movement by Computer Science Education Week and Code.org reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries through a one-hour introduction to computer science and computer programming.

HourOfCode

During the hour, we discussed what coding (or programming) is, what kinds of devices can be programmed and how devices can be programmed.  We talked about some exciting areas where coding is becoming increasingly important, such as robotics, medicine (ie 3D printing of artificial limbs), digital animation, farming, communication and even the fashion industry.

The students then selected one of four online tutorials that introduced programming concepts and extended their skills in coding.  They learnt about commands such as move forward, turn left, turn right, repeat, repeat until, if-then-else and so on.  Using drag and drop blocks, they were able to programme the characters in the activities to draw interesting shapes and patterns or work through mazes and puzzles, dodging obstacles along the way.  They learnt that the ordering of commands is very important and that commands such as repeat can save 100’s of lines of code and make the coding task a lot quicker.

If your child would like to continue with their tutorial at home, or look as some other excellent activities please see the Hour of Code page on this blog by clicking here or go to https://code.org/learn

Year 4s – We did the Hour of Code

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