Resources
A sample of some of the free resources to use for the Hour of Code (and beyond).
Code.org - organizers of Hour of Code and public 501c3 non-profit dedicated to expanding participation in computer science. Set up a teacher account with code.org (optional) and see how your students progress. Their newly created curriculum resources help teachers implement their resources in the classroom.
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Check out the NCLab Hour of Code tutorial with Karel the Robot, available at http://hoc.nclab.com/. Karel is a great way to move up from block programming to written code, and learn Python code formatting on the way. Code formatting is a major step up from block programming, and we provide lot of visual help for that.
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Computer Science Unplugged - http://csunplugged.org/ - a collection of free learning activities that teach Computer Science without a computer.
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Scratch - scratch.mit.edu - Scratch is a programming language and online community where you can create and share your own interactive stories, games, and animations. ScratchEd helps educators dive even deeper into the ScratchEd community.
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Note: ScratchJr is an iPad only app. ScratchJr is an introductory programming language that enables young children to create their own interactive stories and games. Although this geared towards ages 5-7, kids of all ages will enjoy this iPad app. Excellent curriculum resource materials are available on the website.
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Codecademy.com - an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in different programming languages. Codecademy offers courses in HTML & CSS, Javascript, jQuery, Python, Ruby and PHP. If you think this is too advanced for students - think again, I have come across several middle schoolers who are actively using this site. As a teacher you can create a class that allows you to assign modules to students (optional).
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Blockly Games- https://blockly-games.appspot.com is a series of educational games that teach programming. |
At Crunchzilla you will find three interactive tutorials - Code Monster, Code Maven, and Game Maven where kids and adults can play with code, experiment, build, and learn. |
SNAP (formerly BYOB) is a visual, drag-and-drop programming language. It is an extended reimplementation of Scratch (a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab) that allows you to Build Your Own Blocks. It also features first class lists, first class procedures, and continuations. These added capabilities make it suitable for a serious introduction to computer science for high school or college students.
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The Hello Processing sequence of tutorials was produced by the Processing Foundation as a part of the Hour of Code to introduce students to computer programming. |