2017 Kids Coding Club – Week 2

Our second Kids Coding Club meeting is completed! Offering coding programs has become one of the highlights to my week! The kids are interested in the topic and the activities are paced well enough so that they move from one lesson to another quick enough without getting bored.

If you have not read my Week 1 notes, you can get them here. I have instructions on setting up a teacher and student accounts on Code.org, and a first week lesson plan to introduce coding to your group.

For Week 2, we continued following the “Beginning Code Camp with Code.org” lesson plan provided by Jen Fait on WisCodeLiterati. For week 2, we learned about “Loops” in programming, and how they are basically synonymous with the repeat concept. Instead of writing numerous lines of code to have the program accomplish a task over and over, we can write one line of code, and loop it as many times as we wish.

Read more

Balloons!

Everyone, everyone, everyone loves balloons! I think they are one of the fastest ways I know to get kids to smile and feel engaged. So, why not plan a whole STEM program around them?

Resouces:
I researched two programs posted by Growing a Stem Classroom and StemActivitiesForKids.com. Both were excellent resources and helped me envision what I wanted to create with this program. I was also able to find these sites which also have great balloon STEM activities:

Read more

2017 Kids Coding Club- Week 1

This week we held our first Kids Coding Club meeting! This is the first official “coding” program we planned and scheduled for kids at the library. I was able to use a variety of resources to put together a plan that I felt comfortable leading. If you are, or thinking of, leading a coding program, read on!

My biggest fears about offering a coding program are probably not that different from any other librarian’s:

  1. No kids will come. (Actually, that is my biggest fear for any program. And yes, it is okay to admit it).
  2. I am not sure where to begin putting together a lesson plan.
  3. I do not have the technology to offer a program like this.

Thankfully, kids did come, a little help from an awesome librarian pointed me in the right direction for lesson planning, and we were able to find enough computers through some clever asking and borrowing.

Read more