At the beginning of the semester, I had each student fill out a survey for popular topics to explore. Coding was the most popular choice. There are a lot of coding resources for students in LCISD. On classlink, they have a choice of code.org and scratch. In the LCISD Gifted and Talented Online Learning Canvas page there is a Coding Challenge using CSFirst. Students can pick challenges like Code your Hero, The Amazing World of Gumball and other coding challenges. Students that are interested need to contact me for the classcode, username and password.
In class, we used our ipads and an app called Hopscotch. This is a free app available in the App store. They will need an account with an email address attached. It is a fairly simple app that is capable of many things. There is a Youtube channel with tutorials, pixel art and contests. We used a video to make a crossy road game, in the older grades we looked at two different videos before exploring on our own.
Word of the day, person with a passion, puzzlers and spot the difference are fun warm ups to start class for these competitive kids.