To The Hour of Code and Beyond!

Calling all 3rd - 6th Grade Campbell USD teachers! Sign up now for this great learning opportunity, just in time for the Hour of Code! http://pd.campbellusd.org

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5th Grade Dash Robot Biography Project

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The 5th Graders at Forest Hill Elementary School were hard at work turning Dash into the famous person that they had researched. Rosa Yang, Forest Hill's STEAM Task Force Teacher, helped me plan this project, to integrate the math, literacy, and social studies skills that her students were currently working on.  Since her students had just finished learning about metric measurement and rounding, we had them put them to the test to make a timeline to scale. Since Dash moves in increments of 10 centimeters, we had students round the lifespan of their famous person to the nearest 10 cm. They were then challenged to place the five most important parts of their person's life on the timeline, starting from their birthdate, rounding each one to the nearest 10 cm.  The fifth graders then wrote a sentence describing that important life event. They then used the iPad App "Blockly" to program Dash to start at the beginning of the timeline. Each student was then ab...
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3rd Grade Dash Robot Life Cycle Exhibition Projects

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At Sherman Oaks Elementary School, all students in grades TK - 6 prepare an exhibition project to present to the community at the end of the school year. I was thrilled when 3rd grade teacher, Vanessa Diaz, reached out to me about planning their exhibition project around the 3rd NGSS standard of Life Cycles and incorporating programming with the Dash Robots.  In groups, students researched a plant or animal and the different stages in its life cycle. Each student was then responsible for typing a paragraph about a particular stage in the life cycle in Spanish or English (since Sherman Oaks is a Spanish immersion school). Students then worked with their teams to create a poster to organize the stages of their life cycle. We asked them to map out at least six different stopping points for Dash to stop and teach others about that particular stage.  When programming, we also challenged students to have Dash always facing the audience when he is saying something. This ...
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1st Grade Scratch Jr. Animal Habitat Projects

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We tried a new coding app and coaching model at Lynhaven last Monday! The administrators were really supportive and covered two of the class periods so that I could work with all four first grade classes. We had two classes in the room at once and all four teachers could observe and assist me at the same time. Then, after recess we switched to work with the remaining two classes, so all four teachers could observe and assist me a second time. It was ambitious to have 50 first graders working on a new project at the same time, but with 5 teachers it worked out well. The first graders were just starting to learn about habitats and animal adaptations. So we started by having all of the students select an animal (or sprite) that they had some prior knowledge with. We then had students select a background of the habitat that their animal lived in. We chose Scratch Jr. specifically for this project, since there were pre-made background images of the arctic, desert, savannah, ocean, an...
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