Coding in the Classroom

Although only one week has passed since my last blog post, many things have happened during the week which has helped me narrow down my key words.  I have chosen to focus on coding as a keyword.   There are three specific reasons for this decision. First, I had a teacher approach me in the Library Learning Commons and say, “I don’t really get coding.”  As I asked her to clarify, she was honest with me and said she just doesn’t understand it and why it is important to teach our students at such a young age.  Second, last year as a school we purchased many pieces of technology which require an element of coding such as Ozobots, and Dot and Dash. However, with these acquisitions last year they were not really used and I am wondering if this is due to lack of knowledge on how to use or even how using these in the classroom can be beneficial. Third, this week I confirmed the Code Mobile from Canada Learning Code to come to our school. I want to make the Code Mobile visit a success so I feel I need to provide more information and research about coding to support the teachers and students in our building.


From my previous blog post, I mentioned Alberta is currently going through a curriculum re-write.  In this re-write there was a lot of discussion regarding coding being added to the curriculum. At previous working groups, the word coding was used throughout.  Now with the most released document, the word ‘coding’ has been removed but the skills needed for coding are still present.

Essential Understanding : Developing logical thought through reasoning enables us to achieve outcomes and solve problems with more specific learning outcomes related to directions, repetitions, and ordering of steps.

Through searches using the UBC Library, I came across a Coding in the Elementary Classroom (2014) article. This article shares some personal experiences of a teacher in a grade three/four classroom. She shares her students’ experiences as well as some suggestions on how to start including coding along with unplugged coding.  This article also lead me to another website called CS Unplugged  which provides lessons to teach Computer Science through games and puzzles.

The Canada Learning Code website where I booked the Code Mobile from also has many different lesson plans for teachers at various grade levels which are a great introduction for teachers wanting to try coding in the classroom.

I came across this great video about coding which was embedded in an Edutopia blog post about the reasons for integrating coding in the classroom.  The video is actually from a website that I am familiar with called Code.org. This website has many different areas to explore including lessons on how to learn coding as well as great tutorials that are popular for Hour of Code which takes place every December.

I also took time to explore the Code.org YouTube Chanel.  They have many videos and playlists curated which could be beneficial for teachers and students.

Another resource I have came across is Brain Aspinall’s website.  He also has a book called Code Breaker, which I have not read but looks very interesting. His website includes blog posts about coding, TEDx Talks, links to his YouTube videos but I particularly liked his 10 Reasons to Teach Coding blog post in collaboration with Sylvia Duckworth’s sketchnote.  This is a simple representation of the benefits of teaching coding to students.  

There are still many other areas I would like to explore further with regards to coding, including looking further into Non-Fiction and Fiction Books which could be added to our collection about Coding.  I would also like to explore the area of Computational Thinking since this key word emerged in many of the resources I located.

Alberta Education. (2018, July 19). Draft K-4 math curriculum - April 2018. Retrieved from

https://education.alberta.ca/media/3772067/math-april2018.pdf

Aspinall, B. (2015, May 26). 10 Reasons to teach coding. Retrieved from

http://brianaspinall.com/10-reasons-to-teach-coding-sketchnote-by-sylviaduckworth/

Mak, J. (2014). Coding in the elementary school classroom. Learning & Leading with Technology, 41(6), 26.