My Take
I liked the simplicity and ease of use while demonstrating linear thinking of coding. I really enjoyed it myself and watching learners create. Being able to actually see the code was useful too so we were able to try to make sense of what is another language. Having a variety of coding activities that were theme based engaged everyone. Course 2 was worthwhile and we really liked the unplugged activities as well for variety and used these as discussion and reflection points. Overall a great differentiation tool.
How I Use It
We started off talking about what Coding is. There are some useful introduction videos that provide a nice insight into the reason behind coding and its uses. Informative tutorials allow for self paced, independent learning . My grade 3 class started out using the Star Wars coding first as a class. We wrote a few codes together as a class then they were able to go at it on their own. It was quite straight forward. The drag and drop interface was quite easy to manage and learners got used to trial and error to get the hand of the directions. The certificate in the end was nice as we did this as part of the Hour of Code