Baby steps and more

I have been introducing my kids to the sprites and the idea of variables. It is exciting to hear them use the terms and understanding what they mean.

This we are at the point where the kids can change costumes and move the sprites around the screen so I had decided to add the talk command to their knowledge base. As I was starting to do this I remembered that one of the girls had discovered this command last week on her own. So, I turned the SMARTboard over to her and let her teach the class how to do this. Once the kids saw the command they were off and running. After time for exploration I brought the kids back together and we discussed what they had been doing. One boy then asked how do we get two Sprites to talk. Rather than show them, I asked them to tell me what to do. Of course they got both talking with no trouble.   Another kid said “ But they are both talking at the same time.”  With more nudging and discussion one little boy jumped up and raced to the SMARTBoard and said they need to wait. So we added a wait command. After a few tries they got the order working and they all hurried back to their computer to try it out.

It is so fun to watch the kids who don’t usually want to try things discovering and shouting, “Come look at what I did!”

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I intro the project. The  kids have all the pieces so now they will put them together.