We did an hour of code again this year and, this time, we invited Cameron’s old preschool buddy to join us.
At first, Cameron was a bit reluctant to do it (oh, the horrors of gender socialization), but at the end of the event when I asked her what she thought of it she said, “oh, it was the best!” And, that made my day.
While Cameron and the younger kids (K. and her buddy J.) did the Infinity Play Lab module, Dylan and T. did the new Star Wars module which involved an introduction to Javascript–it was still blocks, but at one point, I noticed that T. was actually typing in function names. Sheer awesome.
At the beginning of the session, I introduced just 2 concepts that I knew they’d use in their modules — algorithms and loops. I asked the kids if they’d remembered what an algorithm was (from last year) and Dylan immediately popped out of his seat and started demonstarting while explaning precisely what an algorithm is. I loved it.
Despite her early protests, Cameron actually got pretty excited about the event and made a sign for us!
I was pretty pleased with the event. The big kids went on to play Minecraft and the little ones continued on with the Frozen module (which K. and Cameron had started to do last year). It was fun to watch the kids so engaged. I’m hoping to capitalize on the momentum of the event and have Cameron and Dylan do a bit more during winter break. We’ll see if we actually get some time to spend on it.
