Year 3 enjoyed an afternoon of what appeared to look like playing with Lego and iPads… but what were they learning?
Using the iPad apps ‘Daisy the Dinosaur’ and ‘ Kodables’, the children were introduced to the basics of computer programming and algorithms.
Building with the Lego sets the children carefully followed step by step instructions and explored how simple machines work.
Read on to find out more…
The app ‘Dino the Dinosaur’ on the iPad enabled the children to make a dinosaur move, jump, shrink and grow using drag and drop instructions. Without explicitly using the terms, it encouraged looping and conditional programming. It was a great introduction and within a short time of exploration, the children were ready to apply their learning in the app Kodable.
Kodable takes the children on further with computational thinking, logic and key programming concepts like conditional statements, loops, functions, and debugging. The children again use drag and drop commands to program their fuzz to roll through the exciting Technomazes on the planet Smeeborg just like you would program a computer to run a program.
Even after a first session of exploration the children were able to see how they had applied a variety of logic and problem solving skills, had sequenced events and used loops to repeat a set of commands, and explored how conditional statements such as “If this is true, that will happen”. Today’s exploration captured the children’s interest in programming and from this playful foundation they will be able to continue to learn more explicitly about the world of coding throughout future lessons in KS2.
The word “algorithm” is incredibly difficult to pronounce and yet children have an astounding ability to learn how to use them.
