I have had some experience of teaching coding last year to a Year 8 class last year where we were making an mBot robot follow a black line using sensors.
Blog post 1 Blog post 2
With this, I was using the planning of Mr Dunn as he had been doing this with other Year 7 and 8 classes.
This is my first year planning for it myself.
To start with, I am going to talk to my Year 7 group about what an ALGORITHM is. We will relate it to real life things that they know about and my example will be knitting.
Input - the wool, the algorithm - the knitting pattern, output - a jumper.
This table is what we will fill in with everyday examples. Link to Google Drawing here.
Then we will move on to having a bit of a play with the mBots and a first go at using the mBlock software.
This is the link to my site where I have put all of the activities for this.
The activities are listed on the drop down under Y7 and Y8, coding.
This is the presentation with the first coding activity for the mBot. We are making coloured lights.
I have set it up so it is very visual (I am a graphics / design teacher!!) and so they have to put evidence of their work and thinking as we go.
This one is very simple in order to get them used to using the mBot, the online programme and having to evidence their work with screenshots, videos and analysis of what was happening.
This needs to get more complex as they get experience so they can start deeper analysis of what they did, what happened, what went wrong and what they did to change things.
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