I highly recommend this book to all students who are interested in coding. The activities are sequenced well and build on basic skills to progress quickly to visual coding and then onto more formal coding skills.
All of our Code Clubbers (even the oldies!) found the introduction challenging - they had to think about the step by step instructions they needed to give to make a character move around a game board. From there, they built on their initial instructions to develop symbol instructions (L=Left, R=Right, U=Up, and so on) and then extended that further to include numbers (3L, 2R, 1U, etc). These are the algorithms needed to create their 'program'.
Our students are developing 21st Century skills whilst doing this - they collaborated on the solutions, discussed whether the symbol or the number should be written first and problem-solved together. It is very exciting to see students across classes working so well towards the same goal.
Check out our newbies below working on their algorithms. What an exciting year it is going to be!