Hour of Code for 1st & 2nd graders - YETI

Today I volunteered at Jacob's school to help out with Hour of Code.  It was so much fun!  This year, every 1st through 5th grader in the Riverview School District will participate in Hour of Code, which I think is just so cool.

Because today's 1st and 2nd graders were still a little too young for real coding, the school district's Elementary Instructional Technology Coach, Karen Mayfield, had the students work on some projects from Made with Code https://www.madewithcode.com/projects.

Wow, did we all have a fun time!  If you know an elementary school student, this may be a fun project to check out.  Here's a walkthrough to get started.

Yeti Project
1. Go to https://www.madewithcode.com/project/animation.  If a message appears about the browser not being compatible, it may be necessary to install Google's Chrome browser.  Although there isn't an underline, click the pink "Download" text or go to https://www.google.com/chrome/index.html.

2. Once the screen loads, drag the dark purple frame on the left to the yellow outline in the middle.  This will load the Yeti character:

3. Drag the pink "Character Design" box to the large empty space at the top of the purple Yeti frame:

4. From the "Variables" section on the left, drag the 4 blue squares to the "Character Design" spaces in the middle.  Play with the fur & feet colors.  Hand size ranges from 5 to 25.  Feet size ranges from 5 to 40.  To start with, have them keep the default colors & have them enter hand size 15 and feet size 20.  Once they have some time playing around, it will be fun to go back and customize.

5.  Once Yeti's character has been designed, drag and drop blue action tiles to the lower part of the purple frame in the middle.  Make sure the sequence starts and stops with "entrance" and "exit."  If one of those tiles is forgotten the animation will not work properly.  After creating a sequence, press the pink "Play" button. 

6. Play with variables and actions to see all that the Yeti can do!  Some fun things to try:
 * Set hand and feet size to 5.
 * Set hand size to 25 and feet size to 40.  For some reason, the big, floppy feet totally cracked up the classes.
 * After changing feet size, ask the student if they notice if the dancing is faster and slower.
 * Change the fur and the feet colors.  We had quite a few Seahawks-inspired Yetis in our computer lab.


Notes:
* Depending on the number of actions and the size of the screen, it may be necessary to scroll.  There are 3 gray scroll bars on the page to help navigate the actions on the left, the character design in the middle, and the overall page on the right.
* This page has been very popular this week.  If the website gets too slow, the browser may become unresponsive and show a sick monitor.  If that happens, close the webpage, then open it back up and return to https://www.madewithcode.com/project/animation. Hopefully it won't be necessary to start from scratch. 


More Hour of Code links:
* Code.org tutorials: http://code.org/learn - the Write Your First Computer Program with the Angry Birds picture is a great place to start for kids 3rd grade & older.
* Made with Code projects: https://www.madewithcode.com/projects.  Note: Chrome browser is required for these projects.  If you don't have it already, you can download it here: https://www.google.com/chrome/index.html