Su Adams and myself, Rebecca Evans, offer a 1 day dance and coding workshop for secondary schools. With my background in dance and Su’s in physical computing education we created a day that makes both dance and coding fun and accessible to all.

The overall aims of the session are to introduce students to computational thinking and programming principles through dance and physical computing using Crumble controllers. They can then take this thinking into online environments as well as interactive and creative ones. Learning in a physical environment helps to make what can often seem abstract more tangible and bring understanding in a new way. We have found these workshops also encourage women and BAME students into computing.

Short description of session:

This day is for students with any level of dance and or computing skills. We will introduce and being to understand computational thinking and programming principles through creating a dance sequence in groups of 5/6. The students then head to the computer lab to understand basic circuitry and build their own lights circuit, which they then program to become interactive using block code on Crumble. They can create the lights to react to a press of a button, distance sensors and movement sensors. They can put the two creations together, creating a performance that reacts to changing lights controlled by the other participants.

Example: Jump when the light is green, stop when the light is red, continue looping through the movement sequence when the light is off.

Concepts Covered:

• 4 Cornerstones of Computational Thinking Principles
• Programming Principles
• Testing a Programme and Making Improvements
• Teamwork and Creative Collaboration
• Basic Circuitry
• Block Coding
• Learning, Creating and Performing Movement