I decided to build most of this years EU Code Week events in our school around the Cody Color -game that the Italians introduced to me in the EU Code Week summer school where 25 leading teachers got together to network and learn new things. Thank you Italy!

I started by cutting sheets of paper about 30 cm x 30 cm and introducing the rules to the game to my own class. The instructions you can find here: Color challenge. It’s never too late to try! The kids really loved it.

We spread around the hallways to play. We practiced on a 4 x 4 grid although we later tried on a much bigger one. This grid was excellent for 2 kids but even 4-5 could fit, as long as they knew their steps.

After my class learned the game well we sent invitations to teachers in our school to book us on Code week to come and teach it to their classes. We got many invitations and spent many hours on week 41 teaching other children in our school. On one particular lesson we had 10 spots in the gym for anyone to come and try. For first time users a good hint is to draw a small red dot on the back of your right hand and a yellow one on the left hand. Makes turning the right way a lot easier.

At the end of that class my class tried out the massive 12 x 13 grid with 24 children at the same time! It was super fun but the grid being so big you could only figure out your path so far and some of the success was pure luck.

We also tried the Battle Royale on the website to prepare us for the night school and beating all the parents. After playing on the floor the kids got a hang of the website game really quickly.

On Thursday the 10th of October we had a coding night school. The kids came back to school at 5 o’clock with a lot of parents who had accepted our code challenge. We started with about 50-60 people on the Battle Royale. Everything worked really smoothly. The parents got super excited too! But as hard as they tried they couldn’t beat the kids -some came close 🙂

On the same evening we also tested the code.org website and their Hour of code activities. We got quite a few diplomas printed for completing it!

And we also had time for doing the pixel art posted to EU Code Week teachers group in Facebook by Catherine Swain. Thank you for the fun idea!

But no night school would be fun without pizzas, playing tag on the dark hallways of the school and sleeping altogether on the gym floor. We’ll do all this again next year!

And this excellent 4K class has well deserved their certificates of recognition for contributing to the success of EU Code Week 2019. Good job!