Three in Two
Spend 2 quick minutes exploring 3 cool websites
This week: Hour of Code resources
Next week, students across the country and around the world will be participating in Hour of Code, an event designed to make computer programming less intimidating to us mere mortals. Are you ready to try some coding with your class? Here are some very user-friendly, visually appealing tools to make the experience (nearly) painless - and even fun!
Make School: Build an iPhone game in your browser
If your students seem to spend all of their free time on their phones, have them create a game for it! Make School encourages students to program a simple turn-based game using Swift (ideas introduced apply to programming in general).
Hour of Code with TouchDevelop
TouchDevelop, a division of Microsoft Research, has eight great programming opportunities that are platform agnostic and can be used on laptops, tablets and phones. Additional resources include a to-the-minute planning guide for teachers.
Codecademy: Learn to code interactively, for free
Codecademy's contribution to Hour of Code activities is an enticing introduction to JavaScript, a programming language that students will recognize by name. Clear instructions help a student create an interactive animation of his/her name.