Today marks the start of Computer Science Education Week (#CSEdWeek), which is an annual appeal to K-12 students and teachers to learn, advocate, inspire and celebrate computer science education, across the entire curriculum. The CSEdWeek theme this year is #CSEverywhere, which “highlights the impact that computer science is making everywhere and the relationship it has to different subjects, industries, career paths, and our everyday lives.” (Code.org)
Coding & Robotics Lessons
There are many lessons that you can lead with your class to celebrate CSEdWeek, even if you aren’t a science or math teacher. We’ve developed a few sample lessons you can try that incorporate phonetics, spelling, and geography. We used our friend Photon to complete these lessons, but feel free to use any robot that you have in your school!
Use Photon to help your students learn about phonetics and spelling in a new way! Students will program Photon to identify rhyming words, words with silent letters, correctly spelled words, and more.
Grade Level: 2
The Marco! Photon! lesson combines geography with coding. Students will explore how humans categorize and make sense of the world around them by learning about relative and absolute location. Then, with the help of Photon, students will travel around the world to specific longitude and latitude coordinates. This lesson can be extended further by completing a similar activity where Photon travels around the world’s physical features and landforms.
Grade Level: 6-8
Hour of Code Activities
The Hour of Code was developed to help introduce more students to coding, and teach the basics in manageable, one-hour lessons. Code.org has a whole list of activities for Hour of Code, which are ready-made for your class, organized by grade through high school. The activities span across all subject areas, including one in which students animate a poem with code to illustrate the mood of a poem. In another, students code a game that recreates the conditions for a forest fire, including a fire-fighting air tanker plane to spray water and put out the flames!
Join the conversation
Join in on social media to find other great resources and share what activities you’ve created for CSEdWeek! Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook to be a part of the conversation.
Continued Learning
Integrating coding across subject areas isn’t just for CSEdWeek. Eduscape can help you and your school expand its coding curriculum with custom Professional Learning, either in-person, virtual, or via eLearning courses. Contact us any time at info@eduscape.com to discuss options.