Project Ideas for Unit 7 Creative Coding with the Theater

Hi Friends. My student and I have arrived at Unit 7. I’m curious about what project ideas other students are thinking about for this unit. It seems like it would be more interesting if the project were linked to some sort of real world problems rather than just little animations like I see in most of the examples. Has anyone seen any interesting ideas?

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Hi Emily!

Thank you for bringing up this topic and I’m interested to see what the community generates. Were you looking for other ideas beyond animations in the theatre or were you wanting project topic ideas?

I’ve done projects in the past that are more culturally situated and relevant to the students but these were from other curriculum like the CSD, CSP, and Apple’s Everyone Can Code. They may be a fun project stem for this unit tho since the students are to develop a superclass and one or more subclasses that include public, overridden, overloaded, static, and/or private methods, and also use at least two different data structures to store elements that are manipulated using loops, nested loops, and conditionals. These structures are very open ended and I think with a little direction students can be very creative.

I once had a project where I invited our head custodian, food and nutrition specialist, and nurse into my classroom. These individuals talked to my students about their biggest “head ache” they have to deal with at their job. The students task was to develop an app to help solve this headache. So many ideas came from this and the students learned some faces, names, and roles that help make their schools ecosystem run. It was a really fun project but also took quite a bit of time, way more than the 3 days of development the CSA curriculum allots for. I think with a little creativity an intentionality it could be scaled down into something more reasonable.

Again, thanks for the thoughtful question and I hope more people jump in.

-Sam

@epensinger - Hi Emily, my students created programs that look for a near by restaurant by either cuisine or price and another that recommends movies by rating in several different streaming apps.

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