How Can Teachers Use It?
The Hopscotch website features seven highly flexible lesson plans that help demonstrate how computer programming principles can be relevant and easily incorporated into a broader curriculum. Teachers can take advantage of the developer's suggestions and adapt the lesson plans to fit their classroom's needs. Lessons focus on learning code and also on exploring underlying concepts that are easily applicable to other areas such as math, science, and even literature. Some specific themes that teachers can explore are logical and critical thinking, algorithms, problem-solving, symbolic understanding, clarity, or perseverance.
Look at the Hopscotch community board with kids to explore what others have made and get inspiration. Show them how to examine the code of any project they find. Create a private "crew" so kids can share and collaborate with their classmates. Encourage them to learn from one another through sharing and remixing.
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What's It Like?
Kids explore computer science as they drag and drop blocks of code to create mini-programs. They can browse through posted projects or templates for ideas of what's possible, or watch how-to videos that show how to make a drawing program, design a website, create a game, and more. Once they're ready, kids will get down to business choosing rules that make characters move and draw, and that determine looks and sounds. They'll experiment with computer programming concepts like abstraction, value, flow, sequencing, loops, variables, functions, and conditional logic.
Kids can share their projects with a private teacher-created community (one of the perks of the school edition) or with the Hopscotch community at large. Kids can also "remix," or view and change the code for any posted project. Look also for seven great lesson plans included with the app.
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Is It Good For Learning?
Programming can be difficult, sophisticated work requiring precision, planning, logic, trial and error, and lots and lots of patience. Hopscotch School Edition makes programming accessible for kids without dumbing down the underlying process. All programming options are packaged in neat drag-and-drop blocks, or they can be adjusted with simple scales. In practice, this means kids focus on higher-order critical-thinking themes like cause and effect, actions, and constructing logical sequences rather than getting lost in the details of learning a complicated programming language.
Besides some essential demonstration videos, there's very little direction in navigating the app's features or in creating projects. Kids will need time and patience to explore and learn before they can fully take advantage of the app's capabilities. More explicit guidance would help this app appeal to more kids. Overall, though, Hopscotch is an accessible entrée into the world of computer science, and it can easily serve as a platform for broader learning themes such as critical and logical thinking, planning, and more.
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Create a silly username and start creating, publishing projects, and collecting favorites.
Project templates offer inspiration and an intro how-to video.
Drag and drop pre-packaged programming blocks make programming easy while still allowing for limitless possibilities.
Share and browse projects on the Hopscotch community board.
One example of what kids can make: earn money by setting your lemonade price just right for the day's weather.
Lesson plans introduce programming and easily tie together multiple underlying learning principles.
