Sprites In Action

Sprites In Action With Code.org

    

   ISTE Computational Thinking (Learner)

    Educators continually improve their practice by developing an understanding of computational thinking and its application as a cross-curricular skill. Educators develop a working knowledge of core components of computational thinking: such as decomposition; gathering and analyzing data; abstraction; algorithm design; and how computing impacts people and society. 

    1a.Set professional learning goals to explore and apply teaching strategies for integrating CT practices into learning activities in ways that enhance student learning of both the academic discipline and CS concepts. 

    5.5cUse a variety of instructional approaches to help students frame problems in ways that can be represented as computational steps or algorithms to be performed by a computer.

    5.3aModel and learn with students how to formulate computational solutions to problems and how to give and receive actionable feedback.

   Description:

     As an educator in today's world, we are now having to rely heavily on computational technology. For us as educators, this is forcing us to go online and explore new possibilities that we never knew were possible. In the classroom, we may now see students doing coding on a computer instead of programming a robot. Because of the situation that we are all in, maybe a safer thing to do, but are we as educators really ready to dive into this new way of teaching so quickly?

    This past week, I have been lucky enough to get the opportunity to work with a program called Code.org. This program will allow students AND teachers to get a better understanding of what programming really is, and how to do it. For this specific topic, I will be going over the Sprites in Action game that I was able to play. 

How To Get Started

1. Click this link Code.org and scroll down to the Events section of the screen.
2. Choose the first game that is called Sprites In Action by clicking on the 1 with the circle around it.
3. After you finally get into the game, you will notice that the first challenge is asking you to predict what is going to be happening given the code. If you look at where it says spinning right and moving east, the code is just telling you what is about to happen. 
   
   
   
4. Lesson 3: This is where you will be getting your basic understanding of coding. Your code should not have to change in order to complete this level, but this is what it should look like. 
   
   
   
5. Lesson 8: In this Practice round, you want to make sure that you are able to go in and manipulate the time interval in order for the sprite to move forward at a certain time in the video. This is about what the code should look like when you are complete.
   
   
   
6. Lesson 11: This lesson is one that will give you a little more trouble. It will really make you think about what you need to be inserting into the code. Here is what my code ended up looking like after some trial and error. 
   
   
   
7. Lesson 13: This lesson is all about how you want your sprite to function while you are pressing the keys versus when you are pressing the keys. If you choose "when", your sprite will continue to move even when you are not still pressing that key. However, when you choose the "while" key, you are then asking your sprite to ONLY move while the key is being pressed. Therefore, your sprite will stop whenever you are done pressing that key. This is a code that most video games will use in order to have more control when trying to control your sprite. This is an example of what my code looked like. 
   
   
   

Overall, I feel like this game allows students and teachers to get a better understanding of how to code at a basic level. Teachers will be able to better understand how to help their students learn how their favorite video games work and even how a computer works. All major projects that require coding start as simple code at some point.