Ancient+Civilizations+Coding+Laurels

==As part of the Fifth grade Laurels (final projects in each of their subjects that they complete in order to earn their laurel wreath during their moving up Greek day ceremony), the students used Tynker, a block-based programming platform, to show evidence of learning about each of five ancient civilizations: Sumer/Mesopotamia, Egypt, Maya, China, Greece. This was a multi-level process as it involved first the gathering of the facts in a skeletal outline, finding and saving images to illustrate these facts, uploading these images to Tynker, then writing the "script" for each "actor" including the "Stage". We began this project upon our return from spring break the first week of April with the building of the content.The students worked for approximately four class periods on their outline, basically writing the scripts for each actor in their story. Each civilization represents a scene in Tynker, and each artifact from the different civilizations will become the actors. We likened this to writing a screenplay and the students were the authors and directors. Once the outlines were written the students used Pixabay, WpClipart, Pics4Learning, Photosforclass, or Wikimedia Commons to find images that are creative commons or in the public domain. Occasionally they could not find what they were looking for so they used an advanced search on Google for images labeled for reuse. We spent two class periods gathering images before moving to Tynker where they had six class times to work. Writing the code in Tynker was the last piece of the puzzle. The students had pre-determined how they wanted their project to run- would their actors wait their turn to speak or would they be on click; would the scene switch after the last artifact in a scene spoke or would the viewer have to press a key. They utilized the backpack, placing stacks of code that they would reuse for other actors in other scenes in there to easily pull out when needed. The students wrote hundreds of lines of code for their story to run, many without any actions on behalf of the viewer. They encountered "bugs" (problems with how their story ran) and had to go through the lines of code to find the problem. They used creativity, perseverance, persistence, problem-solving, logical thinking, and digital citizenship skills throughout the process all while leaving their legacy and effectively using technology. Please enjoy. ==