AACPS OIT Byte

This year Computer Science Education week runs from Friday, December 6th through the 12th. Hour of Code, one of their main events, kicks off Monday, the 9th. Hour of code encourages students to code for an hour to hone their skills, but it also allows teachers to discuss careers in coding and computer science how students can explore their interests and plan their path to achieve their goals. Below are several suggestions for how you can get your students involved in CS week or Hour of Code. Hour of Code Activities for PreK through high school. No coding experience necessary! Filter topics by grade level band and then by content to find something that works for your classroom. Topics include Art, Music, AI, Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies and more! Explore the Hour of Code library directly from Classlink. Minecraft Hour Of Code The 2024 theme is The Show Must Go On! Minecraft invites students to step into the theater to find the show’s missing star, unlock hidden gags, s...

by Tracey Brown Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist      If you’ve spent any time around OIT lately, you have probably heard Tracey say it, there is no single bigger bang for your engagement buck than Minecraft Education in the classroom. Educators today can struggle to connect with students, inside and outside of the classroom. Smiles and greetings in the morning are met with a muffled grunt from inside of an oversized hoodie that presumably contains a student. If this is your reality then Minecraft can be the tool that wakes your students up and gets them actively engaging with you and each other, even if only for the duration of the lesson or project that utilizes the app. What Can My Students Do with Minecraft in the Classroom?      Minecraft Education can teach or reinforce content through worlds built by Minecraft experts and provided for educators and students from right inside of the app’s Library, but that isn’t usually where we suggest th...

  By Tracey Brown, Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist The Project At the start of this school year, like many central office teachers, I was asked to teach a class. I taught a one semester 6th grade science elective called Mission to the Stars. Throughout the course students learn about space exploration, what we have done, what we have planned for future missions, what we have learned and what we hope to learn. The overarching question is, “why are we exploring space?” And the answer (for the purposes of this course) is to find habitable planets, Earth-like planets that we could someday travel to and possibly colonize. The course culminates with a project in which the students are supposed to design and build a colony on a habitable planet that we have yet to discover. Their project must include 9 elements from throughout our course that colonist would need to survive on another planet: A research center A medical facility A recreation center Dormitories Bathrooms/showers...