In STEAM class, first graders have been learning how to code stories in ScratchJr. They recently shared their final projects – displaying their technical and creative skills as they walked their families through the digital storytelling process. Below, Lower School STEAM teacher Erika Brinzac shares more about what led up to the project:

We started by solving coding puzzles, during which students got familiar with different types of commands and "snapping" blocks of code together to reach a predetermined goal. We moved into using ScratchJr for our final, open-ended project. Students created stories and had the freedom to use the code that made the most sense for their storyline and storytelling style: character customization, recorded audio, speech bubbles, moving side-to-side, spinning, dis- and reappearing, and more. At this age, the code is in the visual form of blocks, and as they get older, those blocks translate to standard lines of code. 

These hands-on experiences in computational thinking lay the groundwork for students' future STEAM learning.