Do you and your child(ren) have a bedtime routine? Do you have certain rules in place, like “If dinner is in less than an hour, then you can’t have another snack?” Congratulations! You’re already teaching your child(ren) the basics of coding & computer science!
In this Thinkery At Home activity, we invite you to go one step further and Program Your Morning! Our Thinkery Pigs have totally forgotten their morning routine! They need you to give them instructions on how to get ready so they can start their day. Can you put our paper code blocks in the correct order to create a program that tells our Thinkery Pigs what to do?
Coding & programming are learning activities that our team facilitates often, both during Thinkery Camps and at Austin-area elementary campuses through our EdExchange professional development program.
Whenever we introduce the ideas of coding & programming, we learn the basics with this same “Program Your Morning” activity! After this activity, learners are ready to begin using computers to create code that moves robots, tells a knock-knock joke, or animates a dance party — all things that you can do at home, too!
Why we love this activity:
- Let your child(ren) practice reading comprehension & sharpen their critical thinking skills. For beginning readers, break down your program into sections and read each block together. Serialization (putting things in order) and problem-solving are other critical thinking skills that programmers practice each time they create code!
- It’s a hands-on way to connect to coding & programming concepts. The most important lesson: All programs are just sets of instructions, and your job as a computer programmer is to give those instructions to the computer in the correct order!
- It’s a great introduction to Scratch, a free, kid-friendly programming language with limitless possibilities. If your child(ren) are ready to begin exploring coding on a digital platform, there’s no better place to begin than with Scratch. Check out Scratch’s Ideas webpage and start coding today with their step-by-step tutorials!
Be sure to check out the activity guide for more ways to support your learner and go further with this activity!
Click here to find a step-by-step guide to Program Your Morning!
Share your paper-block programs with us on social media! Be sure to tag #thinkeryatx and #thinkeryathome to share your creations with our Thinkery community.