Monthly Archives: May 2014

Writing a story using Hopscotch

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story_code

 

Using the command set text to….  students can write stories with Hopscotch.

Here’s a demonstration by me: a story written by modifying the code written by the Hopscotch team.

http://hop.sc/1tBDdbF

and here two stories written by 2 of my students:

http://hop.sc/1he33ke

http://hop.sc/1izdn0Y

Some students went further and took pictures of their Hopscotch pages to include them into the Explain Everything app.  It allowed them to create a picture audio book with their own voices.  A library of student created stories could be created for younger students to read at home.

 

 

 

 

Sharing programs with Hopscotch users

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HopSharing

 

Hopscotch created many ways to share programs with other users.   They have featured programs, some written by the Hopscotch team that can be viewed or downloaded.  Newcomers can learn how to code from other people who have written all types of programs.  Hopscotch also shares ideas of the week programs that can be used to learn coding.  All users can share programs with other people nearby through the Newest button.  A program can be uploaded by one iPad on the newest network and immediately downloaded by the iPad near by.  Sharing can also be done through the internet with a link to the Hopscotch code.

 

A field trip day

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Today, many of my students were away on a field trip and we were short supply teachers, so we combined students from my two classes and we had iPads.  So we created some Hopscotch programs related to our social studies unit.  Here are some samples.

From our Wendat studies in grade 3.

ft1

 

A long house.

ft2

 

 

Hunting.

ft4

 

A spear.

ft5

 

 

In grade 4, this student made a crown.

 

ft6

 

 

A Chinese village with people interacting.

 

ft8

 

 

Hopscotch bionic man

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http://www.ted.com/talks/hugh_herr_the_new_bionics_that_let_us_run_climb_and_dance

In this inspiring TED talk, Hugh Herr discusses health for everyone using technology.  Many people can walk again using artificial limbs to replace those lost in accidents.  An exosqueleton can help a paralysed person to walk or a healthy person to prevent injury.  There is still a lot of work to be done in this area, to improve prosthetics and there are so many models students can develop to do this.

 

exo

 

Hopscotch link:  http://hop.sc/1jxxYI9

The boy image has been made semi transparent to show the exoskeleton.  If you look carefully, we can see the exoskeleton on the legs and waist of the boy.

 

Preserving heritage sites: Maya Pyramids

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http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_kacyra_ancient_wonders_captured_in_3d

In his talk, Ben Kacyra mentions that several ancient sites and monuments are being lost faster than we can preserve them.  So he developed a technology to preserve ancient sites digitally in 3D.  The most valuable sites are being documented by the CyArk500 challenge.  Following this effort, students can document in Hopscotch the site or artifact of their research.  In this example, we have a Maya pyramid.  Fits in the grade 4 social studies curriculum.

maya

Hopscotch link: http://hop.sc/1gHZmD3

 

Hopscotch abilities with Arabic chess

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http://www.amazon.ca/1001-Inventions-Muslim-Heritage-World/dp/0955242606/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1400520869&sr=8-3&keywords=1001+inventions+muslim+heritage

Here’s a Hopscotch program for social studies grade 4: Muslim’s Heritage : an ancient chess game.  The idea is taken from the above book:  1001 Inventions – Muslim Heritage in Our World.

Link to Hopscotch program: http://hop.sc/1h0D3TK

echec2

 

 

Here’s the working environment.  The robot makes the yellow background.  The monkey makes the chess board.   And all the others are renamed text-objects.  Each text-object can be renamed with any of the keyboards available on the iPad.  In this case, we used 3 keyboards:  English, French and Arabic.  To make the programming easier, each text-object is just positioned on the screen with my fingers as it should appear on the screen.  This removes the need to code the exact position X Y in the program.

echec1

 

An “ability” needed to be created however, once, to turn the Arabic text upside down.  All Arabic text object used the same ability.

echec5

 

echec6

 

 

The chess board is created with two abilities: vertical and horizontal lines.

echec3

 

 

The algorithm for both function is almost the same.  Both use the same 3 variables for the X and Y positions and LARGEUR for the width of the board game.  We set the initial values, set the position of the beginning location of the drawing and proceed to draw 9 lines.  After each line is drawn, we change the value of the Y variable, to draw the next line a little higher.

echec4

 

 

 

Electrocardiogramme in Hopscotch

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ecg3

 

Link to the program: http://hop.sc/1p0S6Se

ecg1

 

ecg2

 

 

With Hopscotch it is easy to divide our work into manageable parts.  For example, the Electrocardiogramme line could be subdivided into sections.  First, we need to the the initialization, saying where the line will start, the color of the line, the size of the line, and so on.  Then we see the line representing the contraction of the atrea and ventricules.  When the line reaches the end of the screen, it starts again.  Each ability writes a different line with different angles.  The second picture shows the contraction of the ventricule line.   Different projects could be written for a normal heart, a slow heart, an irregular heart.

A nice project for grade 5 science.

 

Object-oriented programming with Hopscotch

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record1

 

record2

 

record3

 

The new version of Hopscotch allows object-oriented programming and the creation of “abilities” that works as functions that can be repeated more than one time by several of the objects.  It takes a bit longer to program well in this way because to use the program well, the student needs to document what they are doing with meaningful names.

Students many times are fascinated by records: the fastest animal, the most extreme event, the tallest building and so on.  The following book provides many ideas that could be a source of interest for a tally or interactive publicity.  It was also used to create this program.

Hopscotch link:

https://community.gethopscotch.com/projects/myth-remix-ncpbagn6akvos1ommuqgeg

Link to the book:

http://www.amazon.ca/LAROUSSE-RECORDS-MULLENHEIM-SOPHIE/dp/2035875676/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1400190899&sr=8-1&keywords=le+larousse+des+records

 

Back in time

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download (51)

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqLAsyG1U1U

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/back-in-time/id450345693?mt=8

As can be seen on the Youtube video, Back in time is a wonderful application to learn about the history of planet Earth.   The app is available in several languages including French.  There is a magnificient timeline that shows the greatest events that occured since the bigbang, the formation of your universe, the development of life, the extinction of the dinosaurs, the development of language, development of the wheel, the ancient civilizations like the Egyptians, the Maya, the Greeks, ancient Rome, ancient China, the Arabs, the first man on the moon and the development of the human genome.

This application can be used in French Immersion from grade 4 with social studies.  The timelime by itself is fascinating.  Each period has pictures with a description that would be accessible to all students.  The description of the period would be accessible to many grade 4 FI students but not all.

The presentation is interesting and seems balanced.

 

Hopscotch Book Publicity

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book1

 

 

book2

 

 

book3

 

 

It took a little longer today since we were surprised with the automatically downloaded version of Hopscotch.  We needed to get used to the new style of programming and then design the book publicity program.

Grade 3 students were supposed to write the title of the book they wanted to publicized and develop an interactive publicity for the book.  They were to write the title, and one fascinating question about he book that would hook someone into reading the book they had selected.   The interaction was to do a tally with other students about answering the question with yes or no.  The results of the tally would be displayed on the screen.

We used variables to do the tally.  That was a new concept for them.  It requires 3 lines of code to do the tally for each answer.

Upon pressing on one animal, the number of counts is tallied and then when the tally is completed they press on the other animal to have the results displayed on the screen.

We still need to word on these concepts as the students have started to understand but I doubt that they have yet mastered it to be able to do it on their own.