Coding Problems

Today, I had my first grade coding group do the My Robotic Friends Cup Stacking activity from code.org. I showed them the video, gave them their materials and showed them one example only using up, down, left and right commands/buttons. Once they got started they interrupted me with, "But how do we get them to stack the cup?" This lead into a great discussion about creating new commands for our code. We made up new symbols and gave definitions of what each of the symbols meant. As students progressed, we found more bugs in our code and had to continuously created new commands. What started with 4 simple commands expanded into 14! It was so fun to listen to their thinking and give them the freedom to choose their own symbols and meanings.