Star Wars and the Hour of Code

Murray Hill Middle School has been supporting coding, creating, & robotics for years – so when the National Hour of Code week was announced we were stoked to support and join in! This year’s theme tapped into pop culture and the latest Star Wars frenzy and as long time fans of the franchise were were saying “Yes, Please!”

I had an offer to buy an early release of the Sphero BB8 – so I nabbed one for our school (don’t worry parents, I used my own money! lol) Kiddos LOVE BB8 – check out our Vine Videos showing kids in action learning how to program and run BB8!

Hour of Code week may be over but it’s never to late to explore how cool it is to learn computer code and have fun with it. The links to games and coding challenges are below!

Corralling BB8 in Mr. Dunbar’s room with our Robotics Team!

Hour of Code Themes

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Star Wars: Building a Galaxy with Code

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Explore a Minecraft world through Code

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Angry Birds – Games 1-11 (2014)

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Plants Vs. Zombies Games 12-20 (2014)

Author Palooza Comes to HoCo!


Author Palooza Howard County’s

First Ever FREE Book Festival

is coming is to you on

October 18th from 2:00 – 4:00pm

at Oakland Mills High School! 

Tommy Greenwald (credit Darren Cox)This is a wonderful opportunity to support our  love of reading.

A portion of the afternoon will include a kid-driven Question and Answer Session with the authors!

Students are invited to submit questions. Their questions can be about one of the books the author has written or about how to get started as a writer. Ask your ELA teacher how to submit your questions!

All student questions received by  will be entered into a drawing for a Barnes and Noble $25.00 gift card. The student must be present at the event in order to ask the author his/her question.

Let’s Rock the House!

  • Free Admission
  • Author Panel: 2:00pm- 3:00pm
  • Reader’s Theater: 2:00-3:00pm
  • Book Sales 3:00-4:00pm
  • Book Signings 3:00-4:00pm
  • Meet Young Authors 3:00-4:00pm
  • Refreshments will be sold
  • Live Music!

Visit the AuthorPalozza website and  follow @AuthorPalooza on Twitter for more!

Brought to you by:

Howard County Public Schools logo

A Book and A Hug

Maryland Council of Teachers of English Language Arts

Follow MHMS_Media on Twitter!

Please Follow us on Twitter! We’re (hopefully) gonna be Tweeting next year about books, cool projects, exciting research, TV & Video production, and more! Sure, Twitter is blocked at MHMS but that’s not gonna stop us from Tweeting about the cool things that are going on at the Murray Hill Middle School Daring School Library!

To support this I’ve also written a really cool lesson for kids on how to write:
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Kids can submit their Twitter book reviews using a Google form rather than Twitter & I can cut & paste them at night from home!

We’re getting used to this new blog.. I finally said goodbye on our old blog and announced our move to here…what do you think? I’ve had some really great feedback, I really appreciate the welcome to Edublogs, and I think we’re gonna like it here!