CodyFeet and storytelling

Publication date: October 18, 2019

By Stefania, EU Code Week Leading Teacher in Italy

CodyFeet is an unplugged game born from an idea of Annalisa Albano, an Italian kindergarten teacher. It’s a game suitable for young students to play on the ground. The game was further developed by teachers participating in a coding summer school in Urbino, together with Professor Alessandro Bogliolo from the University of Urbino.

In CodyFeet the main character is a robot played by a student who reads the instructions with his feet. He/she moves on the cards, available in three colours, yellow, red and grey, responding to three different rotations.

If the card is yellow, the robot rotates 90 degrees counterclockwise, turning to the left. If the card is red, the robot rotates 90 degrees clockwise, turning to the right. If the card is grey, the robot goes ahead.

The two light blue cards represent the beginning and the end of the game. Every card has an arrowhead to enter another, so kids can’t be wrong to build the path.

You can also add storytelling to that, with sequences of a story and ask students to tell the piece of the story when meeting a card representing a piece of the story.

You can use famous fairy tales, such as The Little Prince (by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry).

Or you can create your own stories.

This game can be played in teams and develop the collaborative skills: each team put the cards on the floor and gives instructions to its robot in order to reach the cards and tell the story.

The complexity depends on students’ level and on the story.

You can print the CodyFeet cards and you can draw your sequences in the empty cards available online.

We have started to play this addicting game in a project between the Kindergarten and Primary school during Code Week. Students have exchanged stories and instructions, having fun and learning a lot.