My brother(Larry) and I created and taught a 6th grade early morning programming class once a week from January to the end of April. The class was at Brookwood Elementary’s computer lab. He did the administrative work and I prepared and taught the class. The students were very smart. We were amazed that we have full attendance almost every session at 7 am. We used lessons from code.org, but most were too easy for them, most of which were visual programming. I then created lesson plans for the students to code using javascript / html5. We created simple “choose your own adventures” and a knock off of Flappy birds called Flappy ball. We used jsbin.com as our editor. This allow the students to take their work home with them with out even loging in. jsbin.com lets you branch of any other project and in the case of this class they branched off the lessons. This also allow them to learn a real language, quickly produce results, and show off their work to their peers with a simple url. We also used www.khanacademy.org.
We plan on teaching the class again next year. We are in the process of getting a larger computer lab, or multiple labs, set up at the middle school.
6th grad Programming Class
http://jsbin.com/brookwoodLessons
Brookwood Lessons
- Lesson 1 – Hello World
- Lesson 2 – Ask
- Lesson 3 – If/Else
- Lesson 4 – Choose Your Own Adv
- Lesson 5 – Functions
- Lesson 6 – Rock, paper, Scissors
- Lesson7 – Draw an image
- Lesson8 – Move an image
- Lesson9 – Bounce an image
- Lesson10 – Gravity Bounce an image
- Lesson11 – Create Flappy Birds(drag and drop)
- Lesson12 – Flappy Ball (Build a Game)