An entertaining and creative way to promote computational thinking in learners is through their participation in the EU Code Week, an initiative funded by the European Union in order to boost decoding and coding skills as well as collaboration among schools (For more information visit: https://codeweek.eu/ ).
During a two-hour English session
one class of 5th-graders took part in an activity titled: “And now,
what do I feel?” (which was chosen in order to be combined with emotional
expression activities for World Mental Health Day). Our learners read and
decoded picture codes and, as they were colouring the squares which
corresponded to the pixels of each image, they named the feeling that was
revealed each time in the form of an emoji.
Afterwards they roamed
around the classroom in order to read riddles related to feelings. Those were
posted on the classroom walls and the learners matched each of them with the
appropriate feeling.
Finally, using the digital
app ZaplyCode (https://www.zaplycode.it/) they designed and created digitally their own emoji related to
another feeling (they opted for calmness), which was coded automatically by the
app.
