Highlights with Rootstown Second Graders in the AT&T Classroom

This morning in the AT&T Classroom Miss West introduced the students to spreadsheets using an art activity that incorporated Google Sheets, a free web-based application within the GSuite for creating spreadsheets and visual analyses of data. The lesson required students to solve addition and subtraction problems to auto-generate pixel art images in their spreadsheet. In addition to providing practice with mathematical operations for addition and subtraction, the activity also introduced the second graders to important components of spreadsheets such as cells, rows, & columns.

Building from their previous work with coding and programming, this morning the second graders were introduced to the Code Monkey game platform.  Code Monkey is an online game that engages children with coding and programming concepts as they 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.