Fisher-Price makes programming toy to teach  computer programming to 3 to 6-year-olds


Their new toy, called the caterpillar, teaches coding basics to preschoolers. The company will debut its $50 Think & Learn Code-a-Pillar tonight at Pepcom's Digital Experience, a pre-CES media event, though the toy won't be available to buy until this summer. Instead of getting not-yet-potty-trained kids to code with a screen and keyboard, this plastic caterpillar uses more subtle tactics: it teaches the basics of coding, like sequencing and programming, with segments of the caterpillar's body. Each of these eight segments is labeled with different symbols and colors. Kids put them together, attach them to the caterpillar's smiling, blinky-eyed, motorized head, and press a button to get the whole toy to move.


From my past three years experience I truly believe this will work. I'm actually trying to see if I can start teaching students as young as third-grade how to program, do 3D animation, and also design and programmed their own video games. This includes the basic skills needed, going to advanced skills in computer programming.


And I use the animation and videogame to motivate them to learn how to program and improve their skills each week. If not then their video game will not play they went the way they want it to


http://www.computergraphics.com/


http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/5/10716994/fisher-price-thing-and-learn-code-a-pillar-toy-ces-2016

7th grader - Donovan's Soccer Video Games

He built his own soccer field and lined it, build his own stadium, soccer goals stands etc.   I brought in a third person character controller for him and set the camera up behind him so that we could play the game and see him move and kick goals/

So he went from Autodesk Maya, and then bringing his models into Unity3D, and then putting them in his game adding physics and gravity to his own video game.  He then  was able to publish his game and send it to other students and a bunch of them were playing at last week

We are now going to have our seventh and eighth graders concentrate more on the programming end of the game so they can get a start working on their computer programming skills. This will prepare them for a career in computer science

And my class is now working on in teams and making their own video games. That makes each student has a different part of the game to design and implement