After spending the past few weeks learning how to program a MicroBit, students started on their MicroBit pets. Using their makers skills and the maker supplies we have stocked in the library, students brainstormed with their partners on what animal they wanted to build. They will program a MicroBit to look like the animals face and change expressions on their face. Most chose to do cats, pigs and dogs, but we do have construction underway on a robot, unicorns and even a panda! Stay tuned for the finished projects! I am so excited to see how these turn out!

Students put their coding skills to the test this month by learning a little bit of physical computing using a MicroBit. We started off using EduBlocks to make the transition from block programming to Python easier. These 5th graders caught on really quickly and did their first program using the Python programming language! We started off with a simple scrolling of words, then moved onto images. Students picked from a list of recognized by MicroBit images to program and learned how to program an animation using two different images. Check out the videos of their successes below:

We spent most of the month exploring the different genres in the library. To add a little twist to genre posters, we enlisted the help of our friend, the emoji! Students added an extension to their chromebooks that allowed them to access hundreds of emojis to help them describe their genre that they were assigned. Students were given a template to follow in Google Slides and also had to come up with a definition, examples and emojis to describe their genres. We also reviewed saving pictures to our Google Drives, copying and pasting and formatting. Here are a few examples of student work!

Fifth grade spent the month of December working on holiday projects that incorporated Scratch Programming and Makey Makey. Students were given the choice to create a Christmas tree or a snowman to bring to life with holiday music! We used different color foil to create Christmas tree bulbs and snowman buttons since the foil is conductive and we are working with circuits! Using Google Classroom, students were directed to a folder which housed five different Holiday songs that they could download to their chromebooks. Using Makey Makey, they had to connect the alligator clips to one of the arrows and the other end to the bulb. They then had to use the “when arrow key is pressed” in Scratch to create an algorithm that would play a song when that arrow was pressed. So much fun and lots of learning by all! Check out the results!

With Halloween right around the corner, 5th grade engineered a pumpkin elevator made to lift a plate of candy and a small pumpkin. Their lift had to include a crank and had to successfully lift the pumpkin and candy up and then back down. Lots of persistence with this project and lots of failure that turned into success.