Students were into coding for the first half of the semester (we do the first 3 units), but with two months to go and the students at Unit 3 Lesson 9 or later, about 1/4 of the students are bored out of their skulls (1/4 love it, 1/2 are OK with it) and are begging me for a break.
I want to consider their interests (e.g. two guys would rather build computers than code), so does anyone have any ideas that won’t cost the school anything? They’ve given the course a very good-faith effort, but they are dying.
If I could give them something else to do every 3-4 days, that might work. I’d also be interested in something different I could do with them for a month or more.
Thank you very much.
Gary
My students are slowly chipping away at the Code.Org lessons, some past lesson 16 and 20, but I am seeing the slump too. I surveyed students with google forms to gauge what they are interested in. I found some students are into drones, robots, rockets, and writing stories. My school has drones (not a class set, but 6 of the same drone that can use coding to make it do tricks and run an obstacle course), we have a programmable robot (its old but still works) to make it go through a maze and dance, there is a coding driven Rocket simulator by NASA (we do not have the materials to do rockets at our schools), and I found Twine which is a free Code driven interactive story creator. I am going to break my students into small groups and let them tackle the different “coding” projects and have them do a demonstration as an end of the year Project, I hope this helps.
Thanks very much. I wish we had drones and robots, and rockets would be awesome. Alas, we don’t…and we don’t have money, either!