Silicon Valley Tech Museum: Computer Science Education Week

CSEdWeek at The Tech
Monday, December 9 – Sunday, December 15
Sponsored by Google
Free with Museum admission
Drop-in programs. No registration required.

Code.org has organized an Hour of Code for CSEdWeek. So far, they have 30,000 locations hosting an Hour of Code for 4,000,000 students, across 160 countries. The Tech is proud to take part in this global initiative to promote computer science education, along with many schools and learning organizations all over the world.
 

Program yourself a great week at The Tech!

As part of Code.org’s Hour of Code for CSEdWeek, guests can learn drag-and-drop programming with Blockly and Blockly Turtle Graphics to solve maze puzzles and create their own digital art, or they can go unplugged and program a live zombie in our life-sized version of Plants vs. Zombies. We'll also be partnering with programming-focused partners like Google, Play-i, andGlobaloria to lead programming stations and prototype their technology with guests.

 

During the week, we’ll expose guests to different ways to learn programming, with stations set up throughout the lower level. From learning to code with visual programming languages to mastering games, solving puzzles, making cool designs, and programming robots to do playful tasks, guests will start to think like programmers as they break down complex problems into logical steps and leverage their own creativity to make technology do whatever they want.

 

Guests will get to learn programming directly from Google volunteers and the founders of Play-i, a very successfully crowd-funded robot company that makes computer programming fun and accessible through a robot that teaches the logic behind programming in a hands-on, experiential way. The founders are a team of designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs from Apple, Google, and frog design.
 

Schedule for CSEdWeek at The Tech:

Monday – Friday

10:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m 

Program your way through Blockly maze puzzles with Google volunteers. 

 

10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. 

Program Bo the robot to play a xylophone with the Play-i founders. 
Meet The Tech Awards 2103 laureates Globaloria and play video games designed by their students. 

 

12:00–2:00 p.m. 

Program live zombies in this life-sized version of Plants vs. Zombies.

 

9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. 

Program your own digital art with Blockly Turtle Graphics. 

 

Saturday & Sunday

1:00 – 4:00 p.m. 

Program your way through Blockly maze puzzles with Google volunteers. 

Program Bo the robot to play a xylophone with the Play-i founders.

Program live zombies in this life-sized version of Plants vs. Zombies.

 

9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. 

Program your own digital art with Blockly Turtle Graphics.

 

More on the programming stations:

All stations are great for guests with no programming experience.

Blockly Maze Puzzle station

(Recommended for ages 8 and up)
Located in The Tech Studio

Self-guided puzzles that teach the basics of computer science. In each puzzle, guests write a program that gets a character through a maze. They’ll use Blockly, a visual programming language that has blocks that they drag and drop to write programs. As they use blocks to write code, guests will be able to see the code they write represented in Javascript, a text-based language. There are short videos featuring computer science celebrities Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbuerg, and the maze puzzles have been designed with characters from the games Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies. 

Blockly Maze Tutorial

 

The puzzles align with educational standards from Common Core, NGSS, and CSTA. Code.org designed these puzzles not only to teach basic computer science concepts, including repeat-loops, conditionals, and basic algorithms, but also to have guests see that computer science is fun, approachable, and relevant to their lives. 

 

Blockly Turtle Graphics station

(Recommended for ages 8 and up)
Located in Play.net

Guests build on their experience at the Blockly station as they use the same visual drag-and-drop programming language they used to solve the maze puzzles, but now they’ll have even more Blockly command blocks to choose from as they create their own digital masterpieces.

Blockly Turtle Graphics "The Artist" Tutorials:
Level 1 Tutorial
Level 2 Tutorial
Level 3 Tutorial
Level 4 Tutorial
Level 5 Tutorial
 

Play-i Robot Programming station

(Recommended for ages 3 and up)
Located in The Tech Studio

Guests learn to program Bo the robot to play a xylophone with the founders of Play-i, a new robot company that makes computer programming fun and accessible through a robot that teaches the logic behind programming in a hands-on, experiential way. 

 

Life-Sized Plants vs. Zombies station

(Recommended for ages 5 and up)
Located in the Atrium

Guests will get to program live zombies in this life-sized version of Plants vs. Zombies. They’ll learn to move the zombies with various Blockly-based commands as they navigate through the game, and then they’ll become the zombie as they let other guests program them!

Globaloria Games station
(Recommended for ages 8 and up)
Located in the Atrium
Meet The Tech Awards 2103 laureates Globaloria and play video games designed by their students. Globaloria, developed by MIT Media Lab and Harvard Graduate School of Education graduate, Dr. Idit Harel Caperton, is an award-winning K-12 blended learning network and catalog of digital courses to teach 6th-12th grades to design and code educational games (web/mobile) using industry-standard tools.