Creative arts and coding with Makey Makeys

Our Lady of Lourdes Seven Hills LTST Clare Willemse introduced Makey-Makeys across the school grades as part of Creative Arts lessons. 

The result was a whole school imaginative exploration of understanding connections between science, coding, electricity and creativity.

• Year 2 did a Makey-Makey interactive artwork with Year 2 (no scratch)
• Years 3-4 did basic scratch and groups had to create a project incorporating the Makey-makey as either an interactive artwork, a musical instrument or game controller.
• Years 5-6 went a bit further with scratch and had the choice to create the same options as Stage 2 as well as a dance board. Some groups chose to create an actual video game in scratch but didn't quite incorporate the makey-makey.

Watch the video to see the depth and breadth of learning across the school with the Makey Makeys.

The rubric with curriculum connections can be seen below or click here to see full doc.

Getting started with Coding in the classroom

Students often struggle to make the connection with what programming is and how it connects with the world they live in. 
Teachers also struggle with introducing coding, integrating it across the curriculum and having a continuum to support them.
The following resources are a useful starting point:

In the article linked above in Teacher Magazine below Associate Professor James Curran, Director of the Australian Computing Academy and co-founder of Grok Learning runs through how teachers you can choose which programming language is right for you and your students?

Python

Scratch

He discusses which programming languages are suitable for each band of the Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies and for extra-curricular computing activities.


The article looks at Scratch, Java, Python, Ruby programming languages and others.









Another good article Code-it-Gold looks at Concepts before Coding along with some practical programming resources for teachers.