Celebrate Valentine’s Day with code! This month’s Project Spotlight features a fun and creative coding challenge for CodeX educators—design and display pixel-art hearts, animated messages, or interactive Valentine greetings using Python on the CodeX device. This free project is perfect for students to practice coding while adding a festive touch to their learning.
Find the full project details in the Firia Labs Learning Portal, and join the conversation right here in the Code Collective to share your students’ creations! #CodeWithLove
The Valentine Project was easy to use for beginners. The slides were easy to follow. I appreciated the pause with the full code for the steps so I could walk around and help debug while others could look for their syntax errors or help others at the table with their bugs. The students enjoyed some time to make some creative Valentine messages and images on Day 3 for their friends and family and videotape it to their phones so they could share them. (Without the radio controls)
A few students learned quickly how to spam the messages, but once I acknowledged their find, they went on to do more.
I used this activity as a multi-day project for Exploring Computer Science. I used the first part for a quick activity for APCSA during our intervention time since most had never used the CodeX devices before. It took APCSA students 1/2 the time it took ECS students, mostly because they didn’t get stuck on syntax.
I will be doing this activity again next year! Thanks for the fun!
This is fantastic to hear! Thank you so much for sharing your experience with The Valentine Project. We’re absolutely thrilled that it was a hit with both your ECS and APCSA students! It’s especially rewarding to know the slides were easy to follow and that the pause for the full code was helpful for debugging and peer support – that’s exactly what we hoped for!
We love that your students enjoyed the creative aspect of Day 3, making personalized Valentine messages and images. That’s where the real fun and engagement happens! And it’s great that even the “spamming” discovery turned into a learning moment. Sometimes those unexpected explorations lead to the most interesting discoveries!
It’s also valuable to hear about the time difference between your ECS and APCSA students. This kind of feedback helps us understand how the project can be adapted for different skill levels in the future. We’re so happy that you plan to use it again next year! That’s the highest compliment we could receive. We’re always looking for ways to improve, so if you have any other suggestions or ideas after using it again, please don’t hesitate to share them. We’re a community, and we’re all learning and growing together! Thanks again for your wonderful feedback!
#CodeWithLove