Who is using the space? Do teachers bring classes to use the space during the day? Is it an afterschool club?

Last year I held an afterschool club on Wednesdays from 3-4. I taught the students how to use http://codecademy.org because I thought it would be fun for the students to work at their own pace, but it turned out that the site is really fun for adults and not for kids. It is an unforgiving program that doesn’t give you enough hints when you have made a mistake. It also lacks the bells and whistles that middle school students have grown accustomed to. I also introduced the students to other programs like Tynker and RunMarco. This year however, I am not running a club. Instead the principal gave me my own computer programming elective, which meets on Mondays and Thursdays, two periods a week. I received 12 laptops with the INNOVATION! grant money and I use them with the class. No other teachers use them as I need them for my own program and can’t risk them being broken and waiting for tech support to come out and fix them. Hence, the materials, the laptops, are solely for the kids in my class(es). (I do teach a “library skills” class to each 6th grade homeroom as well and I use the laptops with those classes also). Since my makerspace is an actual class and teachers don’t bring their students to my class, they nevertheless come for research classes and although I am not teaching HTML coding to those classes, I am teaching research and I take out the laptops during those times as well. So the laptops are getting a workout. They are used not just for my makerspace.

Run Marco!

Yesterday and today I taught my students how to use Run Marco! It is very similar to scratch in the way you drag the commands to the left of the screen to tell Marco what to do. It was a success as 90+% of the students were doing the program. It is so much more fun than Codecademy, whereby many of my students gave up with it. One of yesterday's students didn't want to play it though, she wanted to continue to work on making a Web page using the Editra program, which of course was great. I found Run Marco! through edshelf the other day and gave it a try with my students yesterday and it was overall much much more fun than Codecademy.

Commands in Run Marco!

It is colorful, has music, is fun, and is somewhat easy. The students did run into snags though. I had several hands raised and I went from student to student helping them and I found myself challenged as well. Even though the program took about five minutes for me to learn, there were still things I wasn't familiar with. One thing I found with many students was that when they ran into problems with their code, I had them drag their commands to the trash and start again. This worked on at least two occasions and I was glad I was able to help.