You know the week I’m talking about just by reading the title of the post, right? The costumes are already half-assembled (mine – ready at the end of September already, ha-ha), someone brought candy in the computer lab, and your carefully planned coding lesson on conditional statements is not going to survive first contact with a room full of eight-or-ten-year-olds who have been counting down since September.

I stopped fighting that week a long time ago, shortly after my first Halloween as a teacher back in 2018. Instead I lean into it now. The trick is picking activities that look like a party and quietly teach exactly what you were going to teach anyway. Loops are still loops when a witch’s hat is blinking. Conditionals are still conditionals when the vampire-robot is deciding whether it’s been caught in the light or not. Also, Halloween can be very fun for teachers as well when you add a spooky twist to the activities and lessons :)

Here are six ideas that have worked in my lab, sorted roughly by how much prep and equipment they need.

If you have no devices (or no patience for them, like me)

Some years the cart is booked, the tablets are charging, or you simply want thirty minutes of quiet cutting and gluing. Unplugged still counts as coding!

Botley robot Halloween face masks is the easiest entry point on this list. Students choose, cut and glue masks for the Botley robot, then run it through a short robot Halloween parade. The coding thinking happens in the sequencing of the parade, and the craft part is what keeps them busy. Almost no prep on your end, except for printing.

If you have a mixed bag of floor robots in your computer lab, Bot Robotics Halloween-themed Coding Activities covers Code & Go Mouse, Coding Critters, Botley, Dash&Dot and Bee-Bot in one resource, so you’re not hunting for three separate lesson plans depending on which robot is available that day.

What it teaches: sequencing, directional instructions, debugging a route that goes wrong, all in a nice theme of spookiness and Halloween.

If you have micro:bits

This is where Halloween gets genuinely fun in my opinion, because the micro:bit was made for making small things light up and make noise. Yay!

Microbit Halloween witch project with LEDs and cables (my favorite project!) has students wiring external LEDs with crocodile clips and writing three different programs to control them and make some paper fire light up! There’s a real circuit involved, so it doubles as an electricity lesson if you need to tick that box. It also photographs beautifully, which matters if you post to a class blog or send pictures home.

Microbit Halloween Party in a Box is the beginner version of a fun microbit project. Three tasks, a DIY build, and enough structure that students who have never touched a micro:bit can still finish something in one period. And when the project is done – there’s a fun tune playing :)

What it teaches: loops, LED output, basic circuits, composing sounds and reading a program before running it.

If you have Spheros

Sphero robot 6 Halloween coding and driving activities is my centers workhorse. Six short activities means you can set up stations, rotate every eight minutes, and never have a group sitting idle waiting for a robot. Beginner level, so it works for a class where the skill range is wide.

For students who are past the basics, Sphero Bolt Halloween broadcasting activity: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde uses infrared broadcasting between two robots to make one “transform” when it meets the other. Broadcasting is a concept that usually feels abstract, and this makes it visible in about ten seconds. Also, it’s fun to explain to the students about the book and the whole concept of Good vs Evil. You can also try and find a good explanation video for younger students on YouTube, just type something like “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde explained for younger kids”.

What it teaches: speed and heading, sensors, and robot-to-robot communication, IR sensor.

Digital citizenship and Halloween can go hand in hand

Here’s the thing nobody plans for but I believe is useful and a great idea: Halloween is the best digital citizenship week of the year. Masks, disguises, pretending to be someone you’re not, the students are already thinking about identity for completely unrelated reasons.

I put up the Halloween Online Safety Technology Bulletin Board at the end of the month of September and use it as a reference point all through October. The poster does a lot of the talking, and students keep noticing it, and not only because the design is cool. I always have someone in front of the little bulletin board, reading it, and I hear discussions about the stuff that is written all the time.

Something free

If you want to test the waters before committing to a full unit, grab the RIP TECH Spooky Halloween Poster which I just thought would be something fun and nothing more, but it turned out to be a great lesson by itself. It’s free, it’s a bulletin board piece about obsolete technology of the past, and it gets a laugh out of students who have never seen a floppy disk.

These were my recommendations. I hope the post was fun to read and useful for you. If you do some of the mentioned activities – please send me pictures and some feedback, either by e-mail (find it in the Contact Me page of the blog) or as a comment here, I am always so excited to see how my ideas get to be something real in someone else’s classroom :) Thank you for reading and have a great month of September and October!