Day 6 - Our final class!

We started our final class by explaining the answers to the activity from Tuesday. We had the kids share their final games with their tables, and let them explore other projects on the Scratch explore tab.

We ended the class by suggesting other computer science resources they could explore, such as code.org, Swift Playgrounds, and Code monster. We had everyone take a final evaluation, and they shared their favorite part about the course.

Thank you to everyone who joined us these past 3 weeks! It has been so fun and such a learning experience. You guys truly brightened our days, and we hope to see you explore your coding journeys in the future.

"Thanks-a-lot" for the gift :)

~ Blog by Dhwani Sreenivas

Day 5

Today we let the kids continue to work on their bakery games, but ended with an activity that would help the girls understand “real code”.

This activity let them fill in the blanks of real java code which, as they learned, wasn’t as difficult as it looked!

We also have a website that houses this activity and all of our other lessons! Take a look at it here.

Day 4

Today we had a challenge to create storefront shops in Scratch. Players can buy items and gain/lose money. This introduced the concept of variables by using a money variable that changed based on what the user did. We had a demonstration to help everyone get started.

Everyone was really creative, and we saw some pet, clothing, grocery, and even taco stores!

We finished up by giving an evaluation survey on loops.

Day 3

Today we worked on adding obstacles to the mazes the girls created last week. We showed an example project, “Dragons vs. Wizards”, to get a feeling for how obstacles in games worked.

We then had a presentation on loops and conditional statements. These were used to have specific things happen when a character ran into an obstacle.

We finished by having the girls take a quick evaluation survey on operators. We’re officially halfway through the program!

Day 2

For our second class, we had everyone remix a template project and code a sprite so it could complete the given maze. This utilized the event (yellow) and motion (blue) blocks in Scratch.

At the end of class, we gave a presentation on operators. These are a basic, but important aspect of computer science. We reviewed basic operations such as addition , subtraction, multiplication, division, greater than and less than. The girls were introduced to AND and OR statements, and we did a few examples on the board.

Day 1

Today was our first class, and we had 22 people sign up! We set up in the library, and started by asking the girls if they had ever coded before, and explaining what computer science was.

We then introduced them to Scratch by having the girls create their own name tag projects. This helped everyone get to know each other and the coding environment. We had an array of creative projects, including color changing text, animated characters, and different backgrounds.

At the end, we gave a recap of what the girls had just done. By utilizing loops and conditionals, they made colors change forever and characters glide across the screen. Everyone had a lot of fun, and we are ready for games on Thursday!

Preparation

It’s the middle of February break, and amidst driving lessons, college visits, and catching up on sleep, the fEmpower team just got together to put the finishing touches on our curriculum!

We’re super excited to have our fist session start next week and continue through March. Here’s Juliet, Elysia and I working through activities and presentations.

Hard at Work