Category: Applied Design Skills and Technologies (Page 2 of 2)

Hour of Code takes place during Computer Science Education Week, which is this week!

Some smaller versions of our now-grade 7s! This photo is from when I visited UHE a few years ago to teach some coding, back when I held a district position.

The idea behind Hour of Code is get everyone participating in a coding activity at some point throughout the week. Students have all different levels of experience with coding, and it has become part of our B.C. curriculum. While we understand that not all students will grow up to become programmers, learning coding and computational thinking in school helps demystify the powers that drive our everyday technologies, broadens participation in the field of computer science, and nurtures problem solving skills. It is essentially a new literacy needed as our children grow up and navigate the world.

Thinking about coding and modern technologies is especially interesting as we also examine and think about prehistoric technologies early modern humans used to survive, thrive, and observe their world.  Division 3 has been looking at some of the earliest cave art found in Spain, France, and Argentina. This week, students are combining found natural materials to create tools that could be used for painting–then we will test if they work! Keep an eye out for some of our process and finished pieces!

I have positioned some coding links on our Hour of Code page. Feel free to check them out!

Students have been exploring how to write numbers in binary code. Binary is a base-2 number system that is the foundation for machine commands. Each bit in this 6-bit series below can be turned either “on” or “off” in order to represent a value. When a bit is “on” it is represented with a 1, and when it is “off” it is represented with a 0. For example, in order to write the number 10 in binary, we would write 001010. The two 1s appear in the places of 8 and 2, so 8+2=10.

What is the largest number you can make with 6-bits? How would you represent the number 24?

Division 3–Have you noticed the strange addition sentence sticker on my laptop? Have a look the next time you’re here and see if you can solve it! (Hint: it has something to do with binary!)

This week students learned that letters can also be coded in binary using the ASCII alphabet. Each uppercase and lowercase letter can be represented by a decimal number that is translated into an 8-bit binary code. Students mapped out their the letters of their names on grid paper, chose their colours, and beaded their names into a bracelet. They used a different coloured bead as a delimiter to separate each 8-bit letter.

Here is a message for you, Division 3. Let’s see if you can decode it!

1001000  1000001 1010000 1010000 1011001 01000011 01001111 01000100 01001001 01001110 01000111