Young keyboarders with their small hands have limited skills when it comes to keyboarding. It is important that they learn how to use a mouse as many of the educational games they play will require mousing skills. There are many games available to students to learn how to use a mouse.

Students will use knowledge of coding to code through various holiday programs from Code.org and Google.

Decomposition one of the four parts of Computational Thinking breaks down problems into smaller parts so that it is easier to understand and solve them.

There are many simple experiments students can do to analyze data. They can test two objects designed to solve the same problem and compare the strengths and weaknesses of how each performs. The teacher will create a spreadsheet to collect the data to share with the students.

This lesson is an extension of Mystery Science Force Olympics Mystery 3. In this extension, students will create a wrecking ball using the Lego WeDo 2.0 kit and program it to knock down a wall. Students will experiment with different variables (like speed, distance and string length) to answer the question: "How can you knock down a wall?" (credit Mystery Science Mystery 3 guiding question). This activity should be done over multiple days (viewing mystery, building the robot and programing and experimenting). Building instructions for the wrecking ball arm are attached as picture steps.

Using Kodable students will learn about sequence and algorithms and use code to direct classmates during a fun game that gets the class moving.

This lesson will allow students to build their own balloon car racer as an introduction to engineering and coding.  Each pair or team of students will be able to engineer their balloon car, measure the performance of their cars using yard sticks, and set up a basic algorithm to construct and run their machine.PURPOSEThe goals for this lesson are to: (1) integrate engineering and coding to young students; (2) have students independenty identify the steps (an algorithm) to build and improve their racers; (4) be able to spot "bugs" in their algorithm; (3) integrate measurement and addition operations to determine which car went furthest overall; and (4) teach perserverance by showing students that it is normal to find bugs in algorithms/coding.   

First grade task cards for all seven MITECS and ISTE Standards for Students

Second grade task cards for all seven MITECS and ISTE Standards for Students

Students will use previous knowledge of Ozobots and coding to color code a path in a maze to create a snowman.

Students will use previous knowledge of Ozobots and coding to color code a path in a maze to create a snowman.

A presentation about the history and types of computers and the definition of computer science.