Can a whole school code?

We did it!  This week being CSed week, my department chair pushed me to arrange to get everyone coding.  With help from our administration the entire Upper School and Middle School stopped classes and coded for one hour using the Hour of Code 

STEM Challenge Update...

Last Night the STEM Challenge youth winners were recognized. I got to go down because...

WE HAD TWO TEAMS WIN!
 (yes I wanted to shout that with excitement)

Picture Courtesy of Princeton Patch (Greta Cyuler)

 I had the best time watching 5 young women stand tall and demonstrate they can learn to program and create great games!!! The two games that placed were:  Animal Inequalities and Math Racing Mania.  They were 5 of 28 students recognized for hard work (and the only girls!).  I don't think they or I stopped smiling all night long.  It was a magical experience to see them standing tall explaining their games and how it was the first time they programmed.

Many thanks to the STEM Challenge sponsors: AMD, ESA, E Line Media, PBS Kids and CPB, Microsoft X-Box 360, Joan Ganz Cooney Center  plus the outreach sponsors. These places worked hard to plan, organize, and judge these 3700 games.  I had a wonderful time talking to all of the parents of the winners, the winning students, and all of the people who made it happen.  Thanks Brian and Diane!!!  They aren't officially announcing until 10 am this morning, since the adult winners event is today.  But keep watching the STEM Challenge website, there should be an amazing video from the 28 winners, that made me proud to teach these incredible young women.

Thank you ladies for making an amazing night that will not soon be forgotten, and thanks Greta for getting the one picture of all of us and driving down to DC to write about us!

I will update this and post pictures as soon as I am awake... We all drove back last night.. 6am came around too early this morning...

Reflection

The past few weeks have given me time to do some reflection on the class.  I have also spoken to some reporters about the project.  Given that the girls had zero programming knowledge when we started.  I have to say that they did learn some programming concepts. They have an understanding of a random number, variables, if- statements, loops, conditions, and even parameters as a message in scratch.  I have to say that if they went into Intro to Programming in our Upper School they would find themselves successful.   We had 16 class periods (46 minutes) to work on the project (including formal study halls that I took over) over the course of 8 weeks.  We had about 13 games started and 10 completed to some level.  Well 11, one group worked on the levels individually and we had a hard time getting them to work together. (Need to post their levels as they are cool).

The girls learned a lot about problem solving.  The classroom was a very loud classroom since they talked about the problems with each other.  They learned from their failures and found out that sometimes it takes time to get task accomplished.  Some ran into problems and were stuck on the problem for a period or two before they made headway.  Not for the lack of trying, but building from their mistakes, which was great to see.  The majority didn't give up, they wanted to figure it out and get items working.  I also saw many of them give each other praise and support as they finished the games.  They wanted to play each of the games and were always supportive with the comments.

What I plan on doing differently is giving them a fixed timeline of when storyboards and outlines need to be done, making sure that they spend less time with artistic at first and concentrate on the programming so that they can have a game completed then go back and add the items to make the games pretty.  I also plan on having a way to daily chart the group work so that all members of the groups have to do some of the programming.   The equality of the group work is something that is hard to develop and making sure that I have something in place so the girls know that their group dynamic counts in passing the project.

In all, I had a blast with the project and plan on continuing it in my class.  I love that PBS stream focused the challenge to be educational game instead of just a video game.  I think that gave focus to many of my students in the brainstorming and did not become to overwhelmed with the designing of a game.

One more week to go

It has been a crazy week.  I worked with the Biology classes to create climatograms and with the Juniors to start their poetry blog. In addition, yesterday I utilized advisory's study hall in order to check in with all the 8th grade students before they left today on a field trip to NYC.

The majority of the games are progressing nicely.  In fact two of the games are completed.  They now are adding sound and other animations to make it look nicer but they have the programming done.  Most others should be done by next Friday.  Others... well, there were a few who worked consistently but focused more on the splash page and not on the game and won't be done.  I am not disappointed though.  The majority of the girls worked on the games, and learned some programming.  I am impressed on how hard most of them worked on learning how to program when they had zero programming knowledge when we started.

I did give those who I don't think will be done the option to enter the writing competition.  They felt relieved and said they would write the 1500 word essay.  I am still proud of them they did learn some programming, but also learned about time management.  Many re-arranged their programs to fit within the time constraint.  Others added as they figured out one level and found ways to expand. We started to register.  Now I have to figure out how to upload them to a website, for the competition.

Eureka Eureka Eureka!

Well it's not that they are running down the center of town like Archimedes supposedly did, but there has been lots of WHOO, high fives and YES! in the computer labs lately.  It is wonderful to hear the successes and see the perseverance that the teams are demonstrating to get the programs completed.  We are now in overtime and the girls don't seem to mind that I have taken their study halls for two weeks to finish the games.

The thinking and cooperation that is happening in the class is outstanding.  I love watching them discuss and try different ideas.  They are really starting to develop skills that a programmer needs when working collaboratively.  In addition, many can tell you something about objects, loops, if-statements, parameters (indirectly through messages), and variables.

The best thing I see happening:  those students who thought they could never never learn programming are actually enjoying programming.  Most of the girls (regardless how capable they felt they could be) are really working with their teams to build the games.   Most everyone is offering some suggestions to try when debugging and it is great to hear the passion in their suggestions and the brainstorming that is happening when the debugging doesn't work.  They keep trying; keep rearranging the code and then EUREKA!!  I can't wait to see the finished products.