Try an Hour of Code in an Ebook for #CSEdWeek

It’s CSEd Week this week. Code.org and Computing in the Core have effectively merged now, and that’s the organization that owns and promotes CSEd Week. The big focus this year is the Hour of Code — getting all students to do some kind of coding activity for one hour. There are a lot of tutorials now available at the CSEdWeek site.

As readers of this blog now, one of my research activities is to create an electronic book to support high school teachers learning computer science. (Here’s our project webpage.) We’ve been exploring ideas like how best to create videos about computer science (hint: use subgoal labels!) and how to reduce cognitive load (hint: Parson’s problems). We’re also working on multi-modal explanations (evidence suggests that audio narration for code is more effective than text descriptions) and worked examples.

Barb Ericson put together an Hour of Code activity using some of our ideas for learning Python with turtles here, as an Hour of Code activity: http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/IntroPythonTurtles/index.html. Please do try it and let us know what you think!

If you have an Hour of Code activity that isn’t making it to the main CSedWeek.org site, please feel free to link to it here in the comments!