It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to use hardware in my middle school classroom, so I was nervous and excited to break in our new HummingbirdBit Robotics Kits. In the before times, I had used a similar kit, and I knew I wanted to do a better job of isolating the coding and the hardware before combining the two. I also wanted to spend time focusing on input versus output devices as this always seems to be a challenge.
9-12, Advanced Topics, AP Computer Science Principles, Computer Science I, Hybrid Learning, Uncategorized
A few weeks ago I decided to work through this Mixtape tutorial on Repl.it that utilizes the Spotify API. While an excellent tutorial on it’s own, especially for someone teaching themselves, I saw an awesome opportunity to expand each part with rich discussions and discovery activities. Over the course of a few lessons, students explore HTTP requests, discuss the values set forth by the Developer’s Terms of Service, interpret JSON objects, write basic HTML, make use of Flask and Python, and put it all together in the original tutorial’s Mixtape project.
I asked students, “What do you notice? What do you wonder?” about the network traffic. Amazing discussion followed.