Students will learn about debugging as they navigate their Bee-Bots to solve challenges of increasing complexity involving shapes, color, and size.

Ruby's friends got lost and are now scattered across the Bee-Bot mat! Students will navigate the Bee-Bot from one friend to the next using the Team Roles to facilitate taking turns and sharing. Students will then practice debugging strategies with a debugging challenge activity.

Students will engage in a final Bee-Bot challenge connected either to literacy instruction (CVC rhyming words) or math instruction (addition and subtraction), utilizing the 4 team roles to facilitate taking turns and sharing.

After reading the book Bug Dance, students will program their Bee-Bots to perform the dance they learned in the book. Then, students will use the yellow command cards to program their own original dance.

Students will use a 3-button sequence to trace numbers with their Bee-Bots. They will then use the command cards to plan their sequence to trace a letter before programming their Bee-Bot to run.

Students will practice navigating their Bee-Bot across 4-, 5-, and 6- part sequences using the life cycles of a butterfly, frog, and/or pumpkin. Students will explore and practice using team roles as they work through this activity.

Students will be introduced to, or review, the ScratchJr programming environment. They will explore two categories of blocks - motion (blue) and looks (purple) - which they will sequence to create a fun dance party with 1 or more characters in ScratchJr.

Students will use inputs on motion (blue) and looks (purple) blocks to write shorter, more efficient programs in ScratchJr. They will then create a project in ScratchJr in which a character tells a story by moving to various points on a selected background.

Students learn what events are and why they are useful in programs. They will learn to use the start on green flag events and end blocks in ScratchJr. Students will also become familiar with how to program more than one character using the green flag. This allows parallelism, or multiple subprograms executing at the same time.

Students create an animated scene as the culminating project to the first ScratchJr unit module. They will review the concepts and programming blocks that they have learned, and then they will program the scene of Old Macdonald’s farm, where the various farm animals each have their own movement and actions programmed by students.

In this lesson, students will learn about the concept of looping through both unplugged and programming-based activities. In the unplugged lesson, students will perform a simple dance using directions that have repeated commands. As a class, we will revise the directions to include loops. In ScratchJr, students will learn about changing the numbers on motion blocks and how to use the repeat and repeat forever blocks. They will use each of these blocks in ScratchJr projects that they build along with their teacher and class. The teacher can select the project involving loops, or s/he can select from three suggestions provided. (Full lesson plan coming soon!)

In this lesson, students will learn how to add sound as well as speech bubbles to their projects. They will also learn how to add a new page and the wait block to a project, by creating a story about their school day that involves multiple scenes (or pages). This lesson will prepare students for the story project by providing them with the ScratchJr tools they will need to make multi-page stories and make characters communicate. (Full lesson plan coming soon!)

The animation project is the culminating activity for the curriculum and will require two sessions of about an hour. Students will create a ScratchJr project to animate a story that students have read in class or one that students imagine themselves. This project requires students to apply all of the knowledge and skills they have learned throughout the course. On the first project day, students will learn about the elements of a story. They will then spend the remainder of the lesson designing their own stories. On the second project day and last lesson of the curriculum, students will spend the entire lesson creating and then sharing their stories with the class. (Full lesson plan coming soon!)

The animation project is the culminating activity for the curriculum and will require two sessions of about an hour. Students will create a ScratchJr project to animate a story that students have read in class or one that students imagine themselves. This project requires students to apply all of the knowledge and skills they have learned throughout the course. On the first project day, students will learn about the elements of a story. They will then spend the remainder of the lesson designing their own stories. On the second project day and last lesson of the curriculum, students will spend the entire lesson creating and then sharing their stories with the class. (Full lesson plan coming soon!)