Students at Churchill Park School, Marist College and St Heliers School are coding with our tutor Peter Miller. Here’s a summary of the work that he’s doing with his classes in 2018.
Overall
- Students will be working with 3D environments during the 2018 terms.
- There is no set programme for a term, rather the students are encouraged to explore and progress, from whatever their current abilities, at their own pace.
- A note of the topics/areas touched on will be made available to parents after each week of lessons.
- Students are encouraged to manage and limit their own screen time.
Core concepts that will be covered/reinforced throughout any term include:
- Hacking, problem solving and referencing.
- Control flow.
- Values, variables, lists, objects, properties, hierarchies.
- Conditionals, predicates and boolean logic.
- Functions / Custom blocks.
- Messages and events.
- Encapsulation.
During Term 1, students are learning about:
- Hacking (as in Hacker spaces, not as in the movies!) as the primary learning methodology — the way they teach themselves how to code.
- This will be ongoing/reinforced throughout all sessions this year, and students are encouraged to hack at home; this can be continuing work from class, or their own projects/coding environments.
- Students used Beetle Blocks (www.beetleblocks.com) for their hacking in class. Any language/environment can and should be used by students outside of class to hack – transferable skills/experience is a crucial part of the learning process, such as Scratch, Tynker, p5js, and Processing.
- The principles of hacking are: Undo-able changes; One change at a time; Small changes; Not perfectionism (working on lots of aspects, not just one small area); Small prototype projects (not one big project); and Collaboration with and supporting their peers.
- Bugs and Glitches.
- Cursors (aka Beetles), Movement, rotation, scaling and object creation in 3D.
- Control Flow: Sequences and Repeat Loops.
Any questions, get in touch at info@codechampions.nz
For those of our students using Unity, you can download the software to practise your coding at home. The class tutor Ken Ward’s prepared a quick guide to doing this, as follows:
Using the thumbdrive
codechampions.nz 