Last week I was surprised when my 3rd grade class took much longer than I had allowed for to complete some serious app smashing, this week I am plunging into coding in hopscotch with the second grade. For our first lesson we will be drawing hexagons, something they have not studied. In fact last year we didn't try programming until much later in the year. Somewhere along the line I heard "always be sure your reach exceeds your grasp," check.
The program to draw a polygon is a great way to study nested loops. In this case I will be using 2 main commands, 'move with trail' and 'rotate'. The move with trail command controls the length of the side and the rotate controls the angle measure. This will be a regular hexagon, where all the angles and sides are equal. The basic code looks like this.
Once the students draw one hexagon successfully, we introduce another rotate and nest everything inside another repeat block like this.
and when you run the program it looks like this:
Now that I have the code for class written, all I have to do is get Hopscotch launched on all 26 shared iPads and get the program updated and enter nicknames for each user. The recent updates to Hopscotch require the users have a name and since I have not purchased the education version of the app, I don't think there is multiuser support. To protect the kid's identity I will be using nicknames like 'cart01' and 'cart26', the name of the iPad they are working on.
My goals for this lesson include getting student familiar with the properties of a regular hexagon and developing their understanding of loops. We will be each on our own IPads fort this lesson, so I also will be teaching them how to ask their neighbors for help when they get stuck. I will be projecting the code on the board during the lesson and directing students to use the color of the code blocks to help them find the code they need. One spot I anticipate difficulty is that some of the code families hide commands under the word 'more.' So that when you click on the code family, you do not see all of the commands.
How are you using tech to reach beyond the standards and curriculum in your content area classes?
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