Hour of Code 2020: Tynker’s Ready to Make it Great

CS Education Week is December 7-13, 2020. Celebrate with our FREE activities!

This has been a challenging year for educators looking for remote/hybrid STEAM solutions to remote teaching. Tynker has been built for online learning since 2013, when we participated in our first Hour of Code (HoC). Over the years, students around the globe have completed over 270 million Hour of Code activities on Tynker!

This year, we have so many exciting things to offer you:

• Explore our great Hour of Code tutorials for everyone
• Get ready with our HoC training webinars for educators 
• Win prizes for your classroom from anywhere in the world
• Join our live coding sessions with NASA experts
• Make your students smile with our new virtual backgrounds

Still have questions? Check out our FAQs section below or just email our friendly Educator Support team. This December, let us do the heavy lifting for you. We have everything you need to make this HoC your best one yet!

40+ Hour of Code Activities for K-12 

Tynker has over 40 amazing FREE activities for your students, from early block coders to advanced text coders, and from kindergarten through high school.

From puzzles to art, and from games to storytelling! Tynker’s Hour of Code has something to engage every student. We’ve partnered with companies like Mattel to promote girls in STEM, made activities available on multiple devices, and recently added voice-over instructions for pre-readers to many of our Hour of Code lessons. Each lesson has an easy-to-follow Teacher Guide, detailing everything you’ll need to plan and prepare a complete Hour of Code for the broadest range of students.

FREE Training to plan a fun Hour of Code!

Whether this is your first HoC or your fifth, a bit of help getting organized never hurts! Our Get Ready for the Hour of Code with Tynker webinar is designed just for that. This one-hour session will give you everything you need to make your Hour of Code a success. We cover how to:

• Easily manage your classes for all of your Hour of Code Activities
• Inspire your students with activities for every age, interest, and proficiency
• Reward your students with Tynker certificates and badges

Win Fun Prizes for Your Class! 

Inspire your students with Tynker’s Holiday Code Jam where they can show off their coding skills and win fun prizes for the entire class. Code Jam is a skill-based coding competition featuring six exciting challenges to engage your students all week. Participation is FREE and we’re giving away PRIZES! Participants just need a registered Tynker student account so that they can compete using a computer or tablet from the comfort of their home.

This global competition takes place from December 7th to 13th and includes six creative coding challenges for students to build games, interactive stories, virtual dance parties, augmented reality (AR) experiences, and physics-based arcade games. Our judges will select 10 winners, with prizes of $250 for classroom winners and $100 for individual winners. Read the Rules for complete details on how to participate.

Have your students join us LIVE with NASA!

Developed in collaboration with the NASA Office of STEM Education, our space exploration-themed HoC projects encourage students to think big… OUTER SPACE big! Students can:

• Imagine a mission patch for NASA astronauts traveling to Mars.
• Design an obstacle course for a lunar rover.
• Solve challenges and explore living in a lunar habitat.

For 2020, we’re doing something special. Our HoC CodeLab sessions will be LIVE on YouTube and a NASA expert will introduce each coding activity with insights about the actual science and engineering that goes behind it! After that, a Tynker teacher will walk your students through the coding activity. Just have your students join at the times below and we’ll run your Hour of Code for you. Students will even be able to ask questions to the NASA experts and get help on their coding on our moderated chat.

Live sessions are at 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST / 6 PM GMT

This is a can’t miss event for your students! Just RSVP to add these dates to your calendar and have your students join. Recordings will be available after the session if you cannot join live.

New Tynker Virtual Backgrounds just in time for Hour of Code!

Whether you use Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or something else entirely, nothing will put a smile on your students’ faces faster than one of our new virtual backgrounds. Download and use them for your Hour of Code session! Actually, use them at any time throughout the year, there’s one for each day of the week.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

I’m a teacher but I don’t have a Tynker account. How do I get started?

If you use Google Classroom, simply log in at Tynker.com as a teacher and link your classroom.
If you do not use Google Classroom, just

1. Sign up as a teacher
2. Set up your Classroom and add your students

Now you’re ready to have your students log in. Point them to your Classroom in the Tynker Dashboard. That’s where all their Tynker Hour of Code activities will be.

I’d like my entire school/district to participate! How do we start? 

Perfect. You have the ability to affect so many students’ lives during CS Education Week. Kudos to you! Just request temporary administrator access by emailing our Educator Support team and we’ll help you right away.

My students use iPads or Chromebooks. Can I run a Tynker Hour of Code? 

Tynker has Hour of Code activities for all kinds of devices, and we partner with both Apple and Google for Edu, to ensure that experiences on both work seamlessly.

• For iPads, download the Tynker App and look for the folder called Hour of Code. 
• For Chromebooks, just go to https://www.tynker.com/hour-of-code/teacher and follow the above steps for adding Google Classrooms and rosters.