Below is an archive of our Professional Learning sessions. These live sessions are currently closed, but the recorded sessions and their associated lesson plans remain free to view at your leisure.
Email: educators [at] sciencenorth.ca (educators[at]sciencenorth[dot]ca)
Your feedback on our sessions is greatly appreciated.
Using a series of activities, this lesson will talk about seasons and how we can represent them with a mathematical model because they follow a pattern. Students will learn about conditional statements and then use them to illustrate seasonal changes.
In this lesson, students will have the chance to explore movement in 2D spaces both on paper and on screen. They will learn how to communicate position changes using code blocks. This knowledge will be applied in ScratchJr to solve problems and have fun!
Sorting is an important part of science, used to identify and compare key traits. Whether it be living and non-living things, natural and human-made material, or solids and liquids, all of these are examples of sorting in science. In this lesson, students will explore sorting through code, using if/then conditional statements. Students will then apply their learning using colour coded conditional statements to control an Ozobot.
In this lesson, students will learn to recognize gears as a part of a pattern which allow us to predict how gears interact with one another. With this knowledge, students will create rules for gears using conditional statements and apply those rules using both an unplugged activity and an activity using Scratch.
Geometry and coding go together like bread and butter! In this lesson, students will practice the fundamentals of transformation, as well as describing positions in terms of x-y coordinates with both hands-on unplugged and on-screen activities. Students will apply transformations using Scratch to build algorithms that translate, rotate, and reflect shapes.
What do plants need to grow? Using hands-on activities combined with on-screen coding activities, students will explore plants’ needs and represent them using coding concepts. Students will practice using loops to build a program using Scratch to explore repeating patterns and concurrent events in the context of growing plants.
Students will learn the basics of binary as the basis for computer information and perform a hands-on unplugged investigation of patterns in binary. Expanding from this knowledge, students will build simple circuits in TinkerCAD Circuits and investigate coding algorithms, including loops and conditional statements, that can be used to control a circuit’s output.
Students will explore the concept of efficiency and how it applies to both energy and coding. With this parallel in mind, students will have the chance to alter given code to make it more efficient. They will then use MakeCode, a free, open source coding platform, to program sensors in a micro:bit to create an efficiency for an output.
Through this set of hands-on and coding activities, students will investigate fractions and forces of flight. In TinkerCAD, students will look at how code can be used to divide a piece into fractions. In Scratch, they will be challenged to code a flappy bird style game that describes movement using the forces of flight.
Through a series of hands-on and coding activities, students will investigate cell organelles and their functions. Students will learn that many cellular processes are governed by rules or patterns that can be interpreted and expressed in code as conditional statements and loops. They will illustrate this learning by creating a playable Scratch game based on these patterns in cell functions.
Through hands-on and coding activities, students will work with data to investigate independent and dependent events and correlations. They will use these concepts to code a program in Scratch that models interactions in the environment using data inputs. Students will practice using loops, conditional statements, and variables to build and modify their code.
Students will investigate the environmental impacts of choices that increase or reduce emissions of greenhouse gases using both hands-on classroom classroom activities and on-screen coding activities. They will apply their learning to build and iterate code that applies conditional statements, variables, integers, and loops. The result will be a playable game that describes the relationships between gas emissions and environmental impacts.
