Hour of Code With Looking Glass
Looking Glass

The Hour of CodeTM is a nationwide initiative by Computer Science Education Week and Code.org to introduce millions of students to one hour of computer science and computer programming.

This activity uses Looking Glass, a programming environment for ages 10 and up. With Looking Glass, you can create and share animated stories, simple games, and even virtual pets. Looking Glass is the successor to Storytelling Alice, one of the only programming environments to show increased motivation among girls.

Build Animated Stories
Dragon Character

Using Looking Glass, students can create and share their own 3D animated stories. The field of computer science is deeply creative, but students' first experiences do not always reflect this. By writing programs to tell stories, students get exposure to ideas from computing and also to the creativite process behind it.

Engage in Computational Thinking
Looking Glass code

Beyond computer science, the ability to take a large problem and break it into smaller problems is a valuable skill across a variety of endeavors. In Looking Glass, students envision a story they want to tell and find ways to realize those visions by combining actions and programming constructs like loops, conditionals, and parallelism.

Remix Animations
Remixing in Looking Glass

Computer scientists at a variety of experience levels often look to example code in order to learn new skills or develop new features. In Looking Glass, students can remix actions that others in the community have created and then interactively explore how those actions work.

Solve Code Scrambles
Code Scramble activity

Code Scramble Remixes contain all of the actions necessary to create a given animation, but they are out of order. Exploring the behavior of the mixed up code and reordering it to create a specific animation can provide a gentle introduction to a variety of programming constructs and the ways they can be combined to create different behaviors.


Download Looking Glass Now