A brand new Minecraft activity from Code.org and Microsoft heads the bill for the sixth iteration of the Hour of Code - which  runs from December 3-9, 2018. There are already over 40 thousand registered events and there are incentives for classrooms in the US to sign up to be awarded a set of robots or physical computing kits.

The Hour of Code site has been refreshed in preparation for this year's visitation. It boasts over 150 new tutorials, along with favorites from previous years. and better still makes it easier to find what you need. You can filter by grade, experience level (Beginner/ Comfortable), and classroom hardware, (Computers/Android/iPad/iPhone; Poor or no internet/No computers or devices). Every activity on HourOfCode.com has been tested by a teacher committee and they are listed in a teacher-recommended order.

Teachers can find activities designed to reinforce math, language arts, science, social studies, and art. And of course there are activities introducing coding itself, such as App Lab - see Hour of Code 2017 Introduces App Lab -  in which you create your own app in JavaScript using blocks or text.  There are plenty of activities that use Scratch, Python and JavaScript and for pre-readers there's Kodable.

The new Minecraft activity, Voyage Aquatic, takes learners on an adventure to find treasure and solve puzzles with coding.

For this year’s Minecraft Hour of Code, Minecraft teamed up with four YouTube creators–AmyLee33, Netty Plays, iBallisticSquid, and Tomohawk. These creative YouTubers guide participants through 12 unique challenges through caves, ruins, and underwater reefs to solve puzzles and learn coding concepts such as loops and conditionals, two fundamental concepts in computer science. Voyage Aquatic encourages students to think creatively, try different coding solutions, and apply what they learn in this mysterious underwater world. The tutorial also includes a ‘free play’ level for participants to apply what they learn in the prior puzzles and use coding to build imaginative underwater creations.

There's also a  very special new Code.org tutorial which is still under wraps. Stay tuned and we'll reveal it in due course.  

More Information

Hour of Code

Minecraft tutorial

Volunteer for the Hour of Code

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