Hi there! OctoStudio just launched! It’s a free mobile coding app developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT Media Lab.
I am utilizing OctoStudio in a program next week and just finished up my prepping! I run a drop in program for two hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays where students in 3rd-12th grade can stay for as little or long as they like. I am doing OctoStudio and Scratch as stations for an Exploring Coding program. I will preface this that I am very blessed to have iPads and Laptops on hand for programs like this, but I think prompts could be used for people using personal devices as well! I am going to have 3 different prompts for OctoStudio and then for Scratch I have coding cards. I’m attaching my lesson plan and prompt sheets of what we’re doing!
In preparation for the program I made a display piece for a piece of code using craft materials from the Beta Testing Kit that PLIX supplied to ambassadors. It ended up taking me about an hour and a half to code and create the display piece. I decided to make a theater curtain and code a little “show”. I’m somewhat familiar with block coding but still getting comfortable teaching it and incorporating it into my programs. I’ll be really interested to see how long it takes my students to code since they tend to be faster than me with iPads. I also had my coworker make an example and he created a short little story with his goat that went on an adventure. It also took him about an hour and a half. It was very fun to experiment. We were both giggling while creating our code and I enjoyed it so I feel like that’s a good indicator that the kids will as well! I can’t upload videos here so here is a link with our two example videos
@Ehutchison Emily! The goat’s world, and dancing divas with the theater curtains were so delightful and silly. To me, the code blocks seem easy to put together and I love the giggles.
From running OctoStudio workshops with families, kids are definitely very speedy with creating projects. They would also try out different things and create many different projects. In an hour and a half, some may have over 6-10 projects they’ve created.
I ran my OctoStudio program and here’s my reflections! This program wasn’t super well attended, for that I’m really not sure lol. Could’ve been the weather, could’ve been because it was coding focused, who knows I feel like sometimes it’s so hard to tell why some programs get a lot of people and some don’t. 
HOWEVER, I would say this is one of my favorite programs I have ever taught. The few kids that I did have stayed for the whole 2 hours because they were so into it. We all had so much fun creating our code and showing each other. I had both scratch and OctoStudio out for them to pick and choose. The majority went with OctoStudio. We used some of the Scratch coding cards we have to code in OctoStudio and that led to a lot of discussion about how the two are different and how we can use different blocks to do the same thing. In general the kiddos didn’t exactly go off of the prompts I made, they mostly just found a sprite or background that inspired them and went from there. For example one student found a dinosaur photo that we just had on the iPad that then inspired him to make a train driving into the Dino’s mouth. The kids were very excited to download onto their own devices at home to continue their learning, to me that is a major win! The spark was there, they enjoyed it and I enjoyed it! Looking forward to doing more OctoStudio in the future.
