Coding with Tynker

Digital Technologies Curriculum

The Digital Technologies curriculum requires that

By the end of Year 4, students will have had opportunities to create a range of digital solutions, such as interactive adventures that involve user choice, modelling simplified real world systems and simple guessing games.

Their solutions are implemented using appropriate software including visual programming languages that use graphical elements rather than text instructions.

Tynker

Tynker app logoOur Year 4 students have just completed a unit of work where they created interactive quizzes using Tynker – a visual coding app for kids.  Their quiz was based on facts about a natural resource that they had researched for their Unit of Inquiry on Sharing the Planet.

Cyra Overview

Cyra 5Cyra 2

Plans & algorithms

Students were asked to plan their quiz before they started coding in Tynker.  They could do this in writing, with diagrams or whatever method they thought best.  Here is Stacey’s plan .

Coding

The students spent a few weeks exploring the Tynker coding blocks before commencing the creation of their quiz.  Here are a few snippets of code from the student’s quizzes which demonstrate user input (ask), branching (if-then-else), movement (go to), sound and visual effects.

Cyra 1

Cyra’s Copper Quiz

 

Dylan 1

Dylan’s Bauxite Quiz

 

Matlida H 1

Matlida H’s Gold Quiz

Tynker Website

The Tynker Website – https://www.tynker.com – offers teachers a platform to create and manage classes, assign lessons and courses and review and showcase student’s projects.  It also allows students and teachers to open their projects in a browser and access some extra features of Tynker, including the uploading of extra backgrounds.  This was extremely useful for us as we needed maps of Australia as the background for the student’s projects.

Tynker Showcase View

Student Reflections

I learnt how to send a message to other characters, how to make the characters talk, how to make questions for people to answer.   Amelia

It is interesting how the code blocks worked because all of them were a lot different to another.  It helped me that the code blocks were different colours for one theme and different colours for another.  Maya

I learnt that when you look at a Tynker project you think it is easy but if you look at all the code it takes a bit of time.  Lucy

I am proud of how much effort and time that I put into my work but I am also proud of when I went and showed my buddy my Tynker project even though I felt nervous.  Callie

Learning about coding is definitely important because there’s lots of jobs and challenges in school that include coding.  It’s also important to help get electronics working, you need to know coding for electronics.  Dylan

Learning about coding is important because if you want to invent robots you need to code them and you can’t code them if you don’t know how to.  Kasey

Tynker could also be used to explain things, test people’s knowledge, make games, make movies, make puzzles and many more things.  Kathryn

Tynker could also be used in Creative Arts and German.  Harper

Photo Gallery

 

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2 thoughts on “Coding with Tynker

  1. Thank you so much for sharing this idea. I have been struggling to find something simple enough for my Year 3s to code with some IF statements Tynker without it becoming a major task. The quiz questions seem quite doable. I don’t guess you know how to insert a photo or other image into the Tynker iOS app? I worked out how to manage it in the Scratch Jr app, but I wanted to use Tynker because it is has the IF statements. Did your students use the app version as well as the web version?
    I have blogged about my ideas for using IF statements with Year 3 on my own blog, if you are interested: http://janebatham.edublogs.org/2016/09/13/what-if-introducing-conditional-statements-to-year-3/

  2. Hi Jane. Thanks for your feedback and the link to your blog. It looks great and I have followed it. I think Tynker was a great app for our year 4 students to use for this quiz. With a handful of commands they were able to create a simple interactive quiz and there are so many more commands from them to learn over the coming years. The one disadvantage, however, is the inability to insert images onto the stage or a character that you build. For this reason, we started the projects on the Tynker website. I created a class and some empty projects containing various maps of Australia. Students then logged in, copied one of these projects and renamed it. (With a bit of guidance, they could have created their own project and uploaded their own image). They then returned to the iPad app, logged in and synchronised their projects. As they worked on their projects, they were continually synchronised with the website and I could see their projects there. The ‘Showcase’ facility on the website was useful in gathering the final version of each student’s project on one screen and can be used to share selected projects with parents.

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