Recently, the STEMcoding project recorded videos to accompany the first few exercises in order to submit to hourofcode.com which is a national website for computer science education. The tutorials explain the physics of video games and how to code simple but fun games for high school aged students (9-12th grade). If approved, our tutorial will be the first physics-focused set of activities on the hour of code.

Undergraduates from OSU and the University of Mt. Union star in the recordings. Try it out at go.osu.edu/hourofcode

Funding from an OSU connect & collaborate grant very much helped in creating our hour of code submission.

Thanks to the hard work of former Reynoldsburg STEM high school teacher Joe Griffith, we now have detailed solutions and teacher guides for all of our physics exercises (currently there are 15!).

The link to the teacher guides is available near the top of go.osu.edu/physics_coding but you’ll have to e-mail Prof. Chris Orban for the password.

An important aspect of the teacher guides is that many of the exercises can be used without having the students code. For example, students can just change the parameters in the program and see the effect in order to strengthen their conceptual knowledge.

Another important detail of the teacher guides is that Joe Griffith comes from a “modeling instruction” background, which means that he is an expert in developing classroom activities that are active learning and participatory.

This is a big landmark in our effort to provide well-thought out coding resources to teachers. Thanks again to Joe Griffith for putting this together!