"Smart" Storytelling

Last summer Melissa Quisenberry, the Library Media Specialist at Seven Hills Elementary, discovered a few tools that encouraged students to learn emerging coding skills. She immediately began brainstorming ways to integrate coding to allow students to learn and problem solve while working on literacy skills.

"Derek is a wonderful writer and storyteller so I knew that he would be able to use those skills to create a dynamic piece. We started off with the app itself. Since this was new to both of us I urged him to create his Hopscotch code first. I showed him the different features such as changing the colors of the lines and changing the characters. We discussed angles and the commands to enter to make the characters move in different directions to create shapes. Then I let him work with the app and he created his design which became a school."

After he created his code, Derek began to write his story. His code became the illustration for his story and he used it for inspiration. He wrote a great story about monsters working together to build a school because monsters need to go to school, too, right?

He then used Screencast-o-matic to record him reading his story while his Hopscotch design played. "If we were to do this project again, now that we really know how to use the app, we would begin with writing the story first and then moving on to create the illustration."

Derek had an opportunity to share his "smart" story with an audience at the 2014 TechnoExpo.