Week of October 13th-16th

Before reading about our week, check out this article about an awesome app that teaches kids to program using a phone! It's well worth the $2.99 price tag!
http://www.wired.com/2015/10/app-uses-kids-obsession-with-phones-to-teach-them-coding/?mbid=social_twitter

The one 3rd grade class I saw this week learned about variable puzzles and that, in addition to meaning a quantity that varies, variables can also represent a specific unknown. I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of my classes next week!

In 4th grade, we completed the Move Straight Challenge. All groups were successful in making the robot move from the start to finish line and back to the start using degrees, rotations, and seconds. It was interesting to see how many different ways the students came up with to do this. Some used guess and test, others found the circumference of the robot's tire, measured the distance of the track, and divided to find the number of rotations necessary. All groups realized that one rotation equals 360 degrees, so they knew that 3 rotations would be the same as 1080 degrees. It was amazing to see so much mathematical thinking being applied to a real world challenge!

The 5th graders learned how to name values in our programming language using define statements. We talked about how good programmers write something once, define it as a shortcut in the language, and then use the shortcut wherever they want in order to save time and avoid repetition.  One class actually got to begin defining values for their own video games and created screenshots of these games!