6th graders learn to code

Over the past week the students have been coding or practicing their computer science skills. Computer science teaches students design and creativity, logical reasoning, and problem solving skills. It develops students’ computation and critical thinking skills and shows them how to create, not simply use, new technologies.  This fundamental knowledge is needed to prepare students for the 21^st century, regardless of their ultimate field of study or occupation.

Check out what the students had to say about coding.

“I played "Sketch Racer" and I put commands in to get the turtle to draw it was amazingly fun!!! The skill I learned was that you have to put "start" for the character to move when I tell it to. I liked that game; it was lots of fun”!!

“I was using Java Script. In Java Script, I learned how to draw shapes. I really liked it because you can express your creativity and draw different shapes by writing ‘rect’ which means rectangle”.

“The game I was playing was the Scratch Project Editor. You get to program a character and make it do stuff like walking for example. It wasn't that hard to do actually it was really simple”.

“I worked on the light-bot game, in the game I had to try to get the bot to light up the blue squares with the directions I gave him, for that game I just used super-basic programming logic. I really liked it! It was a way to both learn code and have fun by playing the game”.

“The coding activity I did was the, Is Eliza Human? I made a whole conversation, for my friends, and they enjoyed talking to the robot. The skills I used were code language, by typing commands for the computer to do. I like coding the conversation; I thought it was really fun”.

 “I worked on Code Avengers: JavaScript Hour of Code. It is similar to Python, where you type in code and run it. It was JavaScript, as you can see in the name. I liked it because it was like Python (which I also liked), but instead of only teaching you about code, it made it like you were having fun and typing things in as you learned it”.

“Today the coding I did was Sketch racer you had to make a turtle to draw a shape it was kind of hard but at the same time you can use your thinking skills it was a really fun game and I think you will guys enjoy it to”.

“I worked on python and it got easier after a while you have make sure you get every letter right because if you get even one letter wrong like a capital letter or something you get the whole code wrong”.

“I used the Eliza coding thing. I used codes so that I could send and receive messages from the machine. It was really fun because I tested let other people try my program and I used theirs. I would like to try this at home and make one that is better than I just made now. I let my friends try it out and the results were really cool”.