Try an Hour of Code with Tablets

If you have Apple tablets, you can host a fun Hour of Code with the Tynker app. The Tynker app is different from the web version and features six fun puzzle sets and over fifty beginner, intermediate, and advanced tutorials to create drawing, music, animation, storytelling, physics, and arcade game projects.

Getting Started

Download the Tynker app on each tablet. You do not need to download Tynker for Schools (our premium option) because we’re giving away all of our puzzle sets for free during the Hour of Code.

 The Benefits of a Teacher Account

We highly recommend creating a free teacher account for yourself prior to the Hour of Code. With a teacher account, you can download free teacher guides for each Hour of Code activity and puzzle solutions for all the puzzles. You can also create free accounts for your students so that they can save their puzzle progress and any projects they create and access their projects on Web or mobile.

Download Teacher Guide

Creating a Lesson Plan

Create a free teacher account to access a comprehensive teacher guide for tablets, including sample lesson sequences. We recommend splitting your hour into three parts, spending 20 minutes on a puzzle set that interests your students, then 20 minutes each on two do-it-yourself projects.

Sample Hour of Code for K-2:

1. Candy Quest – 20 minutes. Solve at least 10 levels of this puzzle set to understand basic repetition with loops and conditional logic (21 levels total).
2. Character Animation – 10 minutes. Follow the tutorial to easily build and animate characters using Tynker’s Character Creator and create a story (in the Animation directory).
3. Greeting Card – 10 minutes. Follow the tutorial to program an interactive greeting card with tons of options for the background, the message, and other figures in the scene (in the Storytelling directory).
4. Knock-Knock Joke – 20 minutes. Follow the tutorial to write a knock-knock joke. Students can use the suggested joke, but encourage them to come up with their own! (in the Storytelling directory)

Puzzle Sets: Students complete coding puzzles that teach computational thinking, a way of breaking down problems into discrete actions. They learn all the programming basics they’ll need to create their own projects.

Do-It-Yourself Projects: After learning the basics, students can create projects using our templates and tutorials. Following step-by-step instructions, they apply the skills they’ve learned in the puzzles to create art programs, storytelling projects, games, and much more.

Using the App Offline

Students can work offline without a Wifi connection. If you plan to use Tynker offline, open the app beforehand and visit all the directories in “Templates & Tutorials” to download the activities to the tablet. Be sure to check back regularly because we are constantly adding new activities.

Download the app and peruse the activities before the Hour of Code to get a feel for what Tynker offers and choose some of your favorite projects.

Stay tuned for more tips about using Tynker for your Hour of Code!