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Ask HN: Advice/Feedback on Hour of Code for Small Groups Grades 1-4?

2 points by ttcbj ↗ HN
I’ll be volunteering for an hour-of-code activity for small groups (about 7-10) of gifted kids in grades 1 to 4. The kids will be grouped by age, and each group will have 2 hours. I am planning to propose these activities to the gifted teacher and get her feedback.

I am seeking feedback from anyone with experience working with kids this age (teachers, people who have done hour of code).

I have linked a PDF of my current proposal here:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/hour-of-code-temp-feedback/HourOfCodeThoughts.pdf

I'd also be interested in feedback from anyone who has done a very successful hour of code for kids this age.

Thanks!

6 comments

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snazz
For activity 3/4, you might want to use a language with a REPL to make it interactive and allow kids to see the code you're typing run in real time.

This is a really cool idea, though! I wish somebody had come in to my elementary school with this kind of activity!

ttcbj
Thanks, I had never heard of REPL. Great idea. In the unlikely event and of the older kids want to play with the language at home, its also nice that they can just find it on the web.
snazz
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t referring to REPL.it (although that’s cool too), I was referring to the read-eval-print-loop you get when you run python (or irb for ruby, or perl) on its own at the command line without any files or command line arguments. You might have heard it called an interpreter too depending on which language you’ve used.
jetti
I did this last year for the 3rd grade class that my wife teaches. I ended up using code.org's Minecraft Adventurer game[0]. I also went over what programmers do (at a very high level) as well as the impact that programming has on every day life by using examples they were familiar with, such as video games.

Here is the thing, what I did requires that the kids have a computer and I'm not sure if they will all have that in your situation. Also, it requires them to be able to read (at least the activity I did). There were some of the kids that did alright but there were many who did not have the reading comprehension for 3rd grade and were much lower and struggled. That probably won't be an issue with you as you mentioned they are gifted but it is something to think about.

If you need more activities you can visit the hour of code's site[1]. If you have any questions I am happy to answer them to the best of my ability.

Edit: Sorry I didn't read your proposal before replying. Here are my thoughts broken out by activity:

Activity 1: I like the first part but I think that the second part, where you give them the activity may be too much for them. Make sure you time gate it though as it may take a longer time than expected for everybody to finish and you don't want to cut too much into your time. They most likely won't understand what you mean by performance of a linear search and all that goes behind it. I could be wrong, but this is from my experience.

Activity 2: Again, based on my experience, this may be very difficult for them. There is a lot "jargon" being tossed around, and you may be able to dumb it down a bit for the kids, I feel like it still may be out of their grasp.

Activity 3: This is where I would let the kids be hands on with an activity like I suggested or another one. To be honest, most of the kids won't care about this presentation and throwing code up on the screen isn't going to help that. Allowing them to experience first hand what it is like to solve challenges and use logic is a lot more powerful than projecting what you are doing.

I don't mean to be negative or harsh, but this is coming from what I experienced last year when I did this. That being said, I was at a low income school that has a history of under performing students so your experience may vary. [0] https://studio.code.org/s/mc/stage/1/puzzle/1 [1] https://hourofcode.com/us/learn

ttcbj
Thanks for your feedback. I agree that it may be too much, but I am also reluctant to fall back to a gamified computer activity. I am going to see what the teacher thinks, but I will definitely take your comments to heart. My experience with cub scouts is that it is easy to overestimate how much complexity kids can handle in an activity.
jetti
Just FYI the Minecraft activity isn't gamified computer activity, it is actual programming that uses a Block based language. So it has a lot of stuff, like loops, conditionals but it is more visual and allows the kids to see what their code does by watching how their character moves. The premise is that you have to move your character from one part of the map to another and avoid the obsticals. You do this with the Block based language utilizing commands such as move left, move right, move forward, move back. But then there are loops that allow you to move in a given (or multiple) direction multiple times.