Keep on Coding!

Hour of Code may be over, but we hope you are inspired to keep on coding! Recognizing that your days are jam-packed, BrainPOP’s Creative Coding projects incorporate coding into your curriculum in ways that support what you’re already teaching, making it both meaningful and time effective! Our projects cover all subject areas and hundreds of topics, so whether you’re teaching discrete phonemes or universal phenomenon, you’ll find a related coding project.

Creative Coding is adaptable to all different setups and environments. Whether your classroom has a single computer or one-to-one, try one or both of these ideas to get started today!

CODE A MUSEUM

The Scratch-based Museum project prompts students to code a digital museum exhibit about a topic you’re exploring in class. Rather than treat it as a culminating project, integrate it into your daily instruction. Encourage students to add artifacts as they learn new facts and ideas about the topic, building their museum over time.  

Adding artifacts to the museum is quick and easy — just select a sprite, add three coding blocks, and type something about the sprite, such as why it’s important. By end of the unit, the class will have a curated a museum that serves as a playful summative representation of learning.

Whether you have one classroom computer, a few, or a one-to-one setup, your students can participate in this project. In one-computer classrooms, all students can contribute to the museum during a daily meeting time. If you have a few devices, small groups can take turns over time on a shared device. And in one-to-one classrooms, individuals add artifacts to their own museums at the end of each lesson or two.

CODE A MEME OR NEWSCAST

The JavaScript-based Vidcode projects also feature compelling prompts, such as “make a meme” and “produce a newscast”.  Use these prompts as exit tickets, encouraging students to design on paper (offline) a viral meme or a catchy headline at the end of class. This type of reflective activity provides opportunities for students to express what they’ve learned in creative and authentic ways, and provides teachers insight of their understanding, allowing for playful assessment.

Over the course of a few weeks, have students use the planning sheets to help organize their ideas to create memes and write headlines using pen and paper. The repeated exercise will encourage the habit of summarizing their takeaways, and they will amass a collection of memes and headlines. As a culminating activity, at the end of a unit, schedule a single class period to have students code their favorite memes or newscasts using their planning sheets and notes. This final project involves coding in JavaScript as well as collaborating on a series of memes and headlines that retell the highlights of the last few weeks of class.   

These are just a couple of ways to incorporate coding into your daily classroom routine. Please share your ideas for how to keep Hour of Code going in your classroom all year long in the Comments below.