Author: Marina Stanojlovic Mircic
On 27th February we celebrated Digital Learning Day with our Empatico partners from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, USA. American peers are three years younger than my students and they attend fourth grade.
Empatico is a free tool for educators to connect their classrooms with others around the world. We make it simple for virtual connections to exist in classrooms by combining everything needed in one platform: live video, file sharing, a partner classroom, and activities.
Thinking about what we could prepare for this day, we decided to organize for them an “unplugged” code activity. The main objective was to prove to them that anyone can code! My students created bracelets that represent the first letter or short diminutive of the names of American peers with the binary alphabet.
Our activity had several short phases:
- Introduction of the binary system
- Representation of the alphabet with binary code
- Transforming the initials of their name into binary code
- Realization, with different materials, of nice bracelets
- Evaluation, students’ feedback, sharing impressions.