Ozaria, CodeCombat & Gifs

My Grade 6 students have just been working on creating games for our Grade 5s and Grade 8s, using HTML and CSS in Twine. I have a lot of keen coders in this yer group, so wanted to challenge them to now learn some Javascript or Python. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I signed up to Ozaria and CodeCombat (free extended trial for Covid-19 closed schools!). For each of my Grade 6 classes, I made four online classes (6A example: 6A CodeCombat Python, 6A CodeCombat Javascript, 6A Ozaria Python and 6A Ozaria Javascript).
We watched the trailers for both programs, then they got to pick which program and which type of code they would learn.

Both websites are great. I can follow along and see exactly where students are at. I can jump in and play any of the levels, which helps me easily support my students. The websites are full of teacher resources, including the solution for each level, in case you need help too.
I am having students fill in a reflection at the end of every class, which includes AtL reflection and screenshots of their work. I also did an example to show the students what I expected. They upload their reflections at the end of every class and they will embed it on their e-portfolios after the vacation too.

Today, to make things a little different, I got my students to make a gif of one of their levels on Giphy.

Here are some of the gifs they created!

Once you have made a gif, you can right click it and save the image to your computer (sometimes you have to keep clicking around the image, till it gives you the 'save image' option). Then you can put any of those gifs inside your Google Doc! For Design, this is excellent, because they can make gifs to show technical skills, to show when things went wrong, etc. Next year I will use this for students working on everything from Adobe Illustrator to working with the EV3s for FLL!