From unplugged activities to using mBot in 3 differents classes

Publication date: October 18, 2019

By Anita and Marina, CodeWeek Teachers in Croatia

The 4th, 5th and 6th-grade students of our Elementary School “Antun and Stjepan Radic” in Gunja participated in the EU Coding Week through various workshops.

The 4th graders participated in the workshop “Creative Developers”, where they received maps with folders that had a predefined start space (Flurb) and end space (fruit). Students had to bring fruits to the fruit on each card, using the arrows provided. The bridge from algorithms to programming can be short if students understand the difference between plotting a sequence and
encoding it in the appropriate language. This activity was meant to help students gain reading and writing experience in short code.

The 5th graders participated in a workshop called “QR Codes and Micro:Bit”, where they looked for hidden treasure by reading QR codes and solving related tasks.

The 6th graders participated in the “Introduce Minecraft and Show How to Play” workshop. Minecraft is an online game about setting blocks and performing adventures. Students learned what Microsoft MakeCode is. In MakeCode, they can encode or program blocks or JavaScript.

The second workshop for the 6th graders was “Starting mBot”, where students press buttons on the remote control to select a manual mode where the arrow keys on the remote control operate the robot. The larger the number they choose (1 to 9), the faster the mBot moves.

All workshops were held by the computer science teacher Marina Blaževac, at the school library, in collaboration with the school librarian Anita Tufekčić.