This morning in the AT&T Classroom the Rootstown third graders were introduced to the Buncee EDU platform to use as a writing and project design tool for sharing information regarding important Rootstown landmarks. Buncee is a free multi-platform tool that students can use to create multimedia projects. The platform offers an interactive digital canvas with thematic background templates that can be used to create animations, stories, books, presentations, pamphlets, posters, etc. Students are able to customize the templates by adding animations, pictures, text, drawings, and videos. The Buncee platform also offers a very large gallery of searchable media that students can use in their projects or students have the option to import external media from their computers or other websites. Completed Buncee projects can be viewed online and/or saved as PDFs. 
Later this morning the third graders explored the basic elements of coding using the Code Monkey game platform. Code Monkey is an online game that engages children with coding and programming concepts as they are participate in game play. The game involves the child helping a monkey retrieve her lost bananas as she travels through a map of coding puzzles. The platform offers a split screen so that players are coding on the right side and viewing the results of their code as the game progresses on the left side. To proceed through each level, players must write and "run" code snippets on the right side of the screen to steer the monkey across each level on the left side of the screen. Each new level introduces an additional piece of code or a new function. In addition to building expertise with programming language, games such as Code Monkey also offer important opportunities to children for further developing their creativity and problem solving skills as well as skills for divergent and higher order thinking.
