Just completed two days of Apple Coding training with Edgar Esteves, along with a host of other Chappaqua elementary teachers.  Most of our work centered around the Everyone Can Code curriculum and the Tynker and Swift Playground apps.  My third grade students will be able to access these apps as they will have 1:1 iPads available to them for the 2018-19 school year.

The Apple curriculum (in our case: Getting Started with Code 1 and 2) is built around introducing a concept - like debugging, algorithms, loops, decomposition, conditionals, etc.  Students then have the opportunity to practice the skills through a series of activities in either Tynker or Swift Playground.  We largely used Tynker, which is more appropriate for third and fourth graders.

In Tynker, students take control of either a young astronaut (Space Cadet modules - which are good for 3rd grade) ...

Space Cadet

... or a dragon (Dragon Spells modules - which are good for 4th grade).  They give them directions through code to move them in a 2D space in order to reach an objective.

Dragon Spells

In both cases the coding can be in block coding (as shown) or in text coding (Swift language).  The modules are well constructed, in that they will hold the interest of elementary students and scaffold the skills well from simple tasks to more complex.

I like the idea of using the curriculum to introduce concepts and then using several different platforms to practice the skills.  Last year, I worked largely with Code Monkey (another well constructed task-based curriculum) and Scratch (which is open-ended).  We also can use coding with several robots which are available in district, such as Ozobots, Dash and Dot, and Sphero.

All in all, I am excited to introduce these new coding resources to my students in September.