Exciting way to begin learning about coding!
Community Review for Hopscotch-Programming for Kids
My Take
An excellent way to introduce coding to students. The colors and characters are inviting and make the task of coding see fun and easily manageable. The drag and drop makes the process easy and the labelling on the different options are written clearly so students can understand what each block does. When the students used it in "free play" their engagement waned rather quickly as they weren't exactly sure what to do with the various components. After proposing a challenge (maze where characters had to move/ bump into the walls) the students were much more engaged and focused. We used an example maze tutorial from the scratch website as an example to get them started on their project. Without a focused project some students may not tolerate the open-ended nature of this app for a long period of time.
How I Use It
As mentioned above, the students used this app to create a maze for an animal demonstrating a reaction/ effect when they bumped into a wall. It was used as part of an exploratory project during a math unit on geometry and shapes. There is no question that the students learned significant amounts of coding and it was an excellent review of the geometrical shapes that they had learned. The small groups worked well but I would limit it to only two students as there are long periods of time where one student was trying to figure out the coding while the other one did not participate. Having more than two students in a group could cause management issues during moments of frustration.