Lexy Hamilton-Smith from the ABC visited last week to get some footage for a follow-up story on the fast tracked implementation of the Digital Technologies Curriculum in QLD.
Of great interest to the views apparently, is the learning occurring in Junior Classrooms – particularly to do with ‘coding’. We visited two Junior classroom – PMK and 1F.
In Prep MK, they were involved in a rotational learning situation which involved some English and Mathematics activities as well as some digital technologies activities. A new ‘mouse bot’ was being used with some construction mats. This demonstrated the students coding the mouse bot to move along a path to reach the cheese. The students were also using OSMO coding and involved in a systems thinking task with Mrs O’Connor.
In Year 1, the students were involved in part two of a 2 lesson rotation where they had designed a maze for their blue-bots and then were creating the code to direct the blue-bot to travel successfully through it.
The ABC got some really terrific footage here of the kids talking in a very excited way about how much they were enjoying what they were doing and showing how they programmed the blue-bots to do what they wanted.
In the Library we then had a few different groups visit. We had some Year 2 students demonstrate their Scratch Jn Mathematics game and explain to the camera what it was doing. Some Year 5 students listened and encouraged the younger students and then showed their more advanced coding using Hopscotch.
We were also visited by some Prep students, showing off a poem they had animated using Scratch Jn.
Some Year 4 students showed off the activity they had done the previous day with mapping and mathematics, programming Dash to travel around Australia: