Coding Book Covers

In this CS and ELA integrated lesson for new coders, students will learn to code a digital book cover. First, they will look at existing book covers and discuss what graphic design choices were made. Next, students will look at an digital book cover example before creating several of their own. Students will learn to select sprites to represent the characters in a book and to use events to make the characters speak.

In this Unplugged lesson, students will plan their own interactive book cover. Students will begin by brainstorming books they have enjoyed and select one to design a book cover for. Students should imagine they are recommending the book to someone else and piquing their interest in reading it. Students will introduce two main characters and write a summary of the story. Then they will receive feedback from a peer to ensure they are ready for the next lesson. In the Lesson 3, students will code their own interactive digital book cover.

In this lesson, students will use the skills they learned in the first lesson to make an interactive book cover for a book of their choice. They will warm with a spiraled review of some of the coding blocks needed. Then students will be instructed to code a Sprite Lab project step by step that includes the title, author, main characters, setting and summary of a book. Next class, students will present their work to their classmates.

Note that this is a project progression, meaning student code will follow them from one level to the next. Encourage students to press “Run” on each level to save their code before progressing to the next level.

In this final lesson, students will share their book covers with one another in a gallery walk activity where they explore and play-test their classmates' book cover projects. They leave notes for each classmate, expressing their thoughts and feedback using provided sentence starters. Throughout the lesson, students actively participate in sharing, observing, reflecting, and discussing their book covers, fostering a deeper understanding of design choices and their impact on book selection. The lesson concludes with a wrap-up reflection exercise considering the saying "don't judge a book by its cover" in relation to their own and their classmates' interactive book covers. They discuss in small groups and then as a class, highlighting the role of book covers in conveying information and the uniqueness of individual designs.