Irving Project Lead the Way

This week during Innovation Station sessions 4th and 5th grade students continued coding their scorekeeper program in Scratch JR. The task asked students to set a background, add two goals, and a soccer ball. In order for the program to be utilized for point keeping, they needed to create and add buttons to their program. They then used block-based coding to animate the program's characters. They chose commands to instruct the buttons to send a message to the ball so that when the corresponding button was pressed the ball would move towards one particular goal. Students did a great job and could customize their program with visual and audio affects.

Students who completed programming then used their Scorekeeper program to keep track of points in the math game "Rolling Sums". This game has students partner up, deal 5 ten-frame cards each, then roll a 20 sided dice. The goal is to create an expression that is equal to the rolled number. We modified the activity so that students could use division and multipicalicaion in addition to adding and subtracting. To preface the game we taught a mini lesson on order of operations using the acronym PEMDAS (Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication/Division, Addition/Subtraction). We gave examples of how evaluating an expression without using order of operations will result in an incorrect answer.

Once students began playing the game their goal was to get an answer as close to the rolled number as possible. Closest answer got a point which was then recorded using the Scorekeeper program that students created.

Once again during programming students utilized pair programming where one student is navigating and giving directions while the other student is doing the actual programming.

Next week students will have a chance to continue their game and practice both order of operations while using an original program.

Next week I will be launching reading projects with a group of Mrs. Baumgardt and Mr. Mocco's students. I'm excited to get this PBL unit going and looking forward to seeing the students' work!

Have a great weekend!