In this lesson, students will learn about the two concepts at the heart of Sprite Lab: sprites and behaviors. Sprites are characters or objects on the screen that students can move, change, and manipulate. Behaviors are actions that sprites will take continuously until they are stopped.

This lesson features Sprite Lab, a platform where students can create their own interactive animations and games. In addition to behaviors, today students will incorporate user input as events to create an "alien dance party".

Watch student faces light up as they make their own gorgeous designs using a small number of blocks and digital stickers! This lesson builds on the understanding of loops from previous lessons and gives students a chance to be truly creative. This activity is fantastic for producing artifacts for portfolios or parent/teacher conferences.

In this online activity, students will have the opportunity to push their understanding of loops to a whole new level. Playing with the Bee and Plants vs Zombies, students will learn how to program a loop to be inside of another loop. They will also be encouraged to figure out how little changes in either loop will affect their program when they click `Run`.

Variables are used as placeholders for values such as numbers or words. Variables allow for a lot of freedom in programming. Instead of having to type out a phrase many times or remember an obscure number, computer scientists can use variables to reference them. This lesson helps to explain what variables are and how we can use them in many different ways. The idea of variables isn't an easy concept to grasp, so we recommend allowing plenty of time for discussion at the end of the lesson.

In this lesson, students will explore the creation of repetitive designs using variables in the Artist environment. Students will learn how variables can be used to make code easier to write and easier to read, even when the values don't change at runtime.

This lesson will help illustrate how variables can make programs more powerful by allowing values to change while the code is running.

In this lesson, students will explore the creation of repetitive designs using variables in the Artist environment. Students will learn how variables can be used to make code easier to write and easier to read. After guided puzzles, students will end in a freeplay level to show what they have learned and create their own designs.

This lesson was originally created for the Hour of Code, alongside the Minecraft team. Students will get the chance to practice ideas that they have learned up to this point, as well as getting a sneak peek at conditionals!

Up until this point students have been writing code that executes exactly the same way each time it is run - reliable, but not very flexible. In this lesson, your class will begin to code with conditionals, allowing them to write code that functions differently depending on the specific conditions the program encounters.

By the time students reach this lesson, they should already have plenty of practice using `repeat` loops, so now it's time to mix things up.

_While loops_ are loops that continue to repeat commands while a condition is met. `While` loops are used when the programmer doesn't know the exact number of times commands need to be repeated, but does know what condition needs to be true in order for the loop to continue repeating. For example, students will be working to fill holes and dig dirt in Farmer. They will not know the size of the holes or the height of the mountains of dirt, but the students will know they need to keep filling the holes and digging the dirt as long as the ground is not flat.

This lesson was originally created for the Hour of Code, alongside the Minecraft team. Students will get the chance to practice ideas that they have learned up to this point, as well as getting a sneak peek at conditionals!

In this lesson, students will learn about `until` loops. Students will build programs that have the main character repeat actions `until` they reach their desired stopping point.

Students will practice `while` loops, `until` loops, and `if / else` statements. All of these blocks use conditionals. By practicing all three, students will learn to write complex and flexible code.

Students will begin to understand how functions can be helpful in this fun and interactive Minecraft adventure!

Students have practiced creating impressive designs in Artist and navigating mazes in Bee, but today they will use functions to harvest crops in Harvester. This lesson will push students to use functions in the new ways by combining them with `while` loops and `if / else` statements.

Students will be introduced to using functions on Code.org. Magnificent images will be created and modified with functions in Artist. For more complicated patterns, students will learn about nesting functions by calling one function from inside another.

In this lesson, students will explore the creation of repetitive designs using variables in the Artist environment. Students will learn how variables can be used to make code easier to write and easier to read, even when the values don't change at runtime.

In this lesson, students will program their own interactive dance party. This activity requires sound as the tool was built to respond to music.

This lesson will help illustrate how variables can make programs more powerful by allowing values to change while the code is running.