Last week, 70 Cornell Tech students traveled to Roosevelt Island to teach coding classes to middle schoolers for our second tech event at PS/IS 217, “Let’s Code Roosevelt Island.”
Student volunteers worked with 63 sixth, seventh and eighth grade students to develop spooky, Halloween-themed coding games using the coding language Scratch.
Cornell Tech worked with the Museum of the Moving Image, which holds regular coding workshops with middle school students and teachers, to build the project and train the grad student volunteers on working with Scratch. Scratch is a coding language developed by MIT that is easy to learn and use, even for beginners.
PS/IS 217 students worked one-on-one with Cornell Tech grad students to create a game they could take with them to play — and continue building — at home.
The day was filled with surprises and highlighted just how fun and easy coding can be for kids. In the end, no two games were the same, despite starting out alike. One enterprising middle schooler even figured out how to incorporate pictures of herself and her Cornell Tech mentor into the game she created. It was her first time ever using Scratch.
In addition to learning critical computational skills, middle school students got to interact directly with Cornell Tech grad students and we all enjoyed the Halloween costumes!
Let’s Code RI is one of many activities Cornell Tech has planned with PS/IS 217 students for the year. Cornell Tech students will be heading back to Roosevelt Island in the spring to work with third and fourth graders and also hopes to host a field trip for upper elementary-aged students to their campus in the Google building.
