This summer, we will use our newsletter to highlight a variety of people, organizations, and resources that are doing work to broaden participation and expand equitable and engaging computer science and STEM opportunities. We are honored to work in this space along with so many talented and passionate individuals and organizations and want to help bring attention to their work.
This Week’s Spotlight: Barefoot Computing
Throughout the spring and summer we have been meeting with educators at our Coffee + CS Ed sessions on Zoom. These are lively, interactive sessions with anywhere from 5 to 15 educators from MN and beyond. During these discussions a wealth of Computer Science resources were shared which you can find here. Today we would like to highlight Barefoot Computing’s activities which we hope will inspire both parents and educators as you embark on your back to school reality.
Barefoot Bytes are activities great for slotting in between lessons to keep your students engaged and excited about learning again. They teach kids about necessary problem solving skills like algorithms, decomposition and patterns while boosting morale and injecting fun into the classroom. Try them!
Barefoot At Home Activities are enjoyable activities designed by teaching professionals for families to do at home with your children. There are three different activity types - learning together activities, mini missions, and interactive learning games. These rely on computation thinking - learning to solve problems with or without a computer.
Learning together activities help guide you through fundamental parts of computing curriculum without the need for screen time.
Mini missions are activities that get children practicing computation thinking skills.
Interactive learning games are fun activities that apply computational thinking concepts to promote learning by playing.
This Week's Project Inspiration Theme: Day of the Programmer
September 12th is Day of the Programmer!
On the 256th day of the year, we honor those who have changed the world with programming. The number 256 is important in code, equaling two to the eight power making it the highest power of two that is less than 365. This value in binary code reads out 1 0000 0000. Try using this app inventor tutorial to teach you how to add a shared component to your code, allowing you to share more of your programming projects with others. Remember, this is just a suggestion; use your own creative genius to create a personalized project!
We hope you create a CS project in honor of Day of the Programmer! If you do, please share it with us.
Share Your CS to Go Projects!
How to Share: We invite CS to Go with Code Savvy participants to consider sharing your projects publicly with the Code Savvy and greater #MNCodes community via video with Flipgrid. We can’t wait to see what you create! Please be sure to follow online safety guidelines and get adult permission before sharing. You can find our Privacy Policy here.
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