ItsTheMitchell

Back on December 23rd of 2018, I published a blog post about teaching coding with Google. It was basically a bullet point list of things I saw as I was looking at the website for the first time. Now I have had the time to implement it with my classes for a week. Here's my thoughts. First, this is a very well laid out platform. There are videos with screencasts showing you exactly what you need to do in order to get started. They frequently use starter projects in Scratch. The starter projects typically include code that is either too complicated for where the students are, or is trivial for their ability if they have made it that far. Often the starter projects will include sprites or backgrounds premade for those particular projects. The videos are high quality. All videos have captions available (in English, I have not looked for other languages) and have the ability to play back at a faster speed, as well as a lower speed. The instructions were clear, and incredibly eas...

Google has been quietly at work in the Computer Science / STEM / STEAM Education world. A couple weeks ago I found out that Google had acquired Workbench Education . Look for a write up on that in the coming weeks. I'm really excited about integrating Workbench into my drone programming unit. That being said, today I'm working through the Google CS First Storytelling Unit. When I Say I'm working through it, I mean I'm going to walk through the process of creating a class, add myself to the class, and see what kinds of activities are included. I'll pop back in periodically with bullet points to keep you informed of my progress. That being said... here we go. Banners talking about a transition to Scratch 3.0 on January 2nd. I'm not sure how in depth the changes to the new version of Scratch are, but that is something to keep in mind. I was able to log in using my school credentials. It looks like the programming is Scratch based. Setting up classes doe...