Alannah's Educational Portfolio

Coding in the Classroom

by · November 2, 2022

This week, our class explored a con­cept I am not famil­iar with in the slight­est: cod­ing. I had min­i­mal knowl­edge of what cod­ing actu­al­ly means or con­sists of, I just knew it was very com­plex. Hav­ing this mind­set, I felt a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ed get­ting start­ed with this week’s con­tent; cod­ing has always seemed far too com­pli­cat­ed and tech­ni­cal for my abil­i­ties. After this week’s class, I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised by how sim­ple cod­ing seemed.

WHAT IS CODING?

  • Cod­ing (also called pro­gram­ming or devel­op­ing) is telling a com­put­er, app, phone or web­site what you want it to do. (Mis­sio, 2015)
Pho­to by luis gomes: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-programming-of-codes-546819/

User-Friendly Coding

Com­put­er cod­ing tends to be per­cieved as an intim­i­dat­ing con­cept. It often presents itself as a com­plex, con­fus­ing skill that can only by tak­en on by pro­fes­sion­als, when in real­i­ty it can start being used as ear­ly as kinder­garten. Scratch is an inter­ac­tive web­site that offers a wide vari­ety of games and activ­i­ties that help intro­duce kids to the fun­da­men­tals of coding. 

Clear Instructions

One of the fea­tures that makes Scratch so great is the tuto­ri­als that accom­pa­ny each game/activity. I played around with a cou­ple dif­fer­ent games on their web­site and I was sur­prised by how straight-for­ward and sim­ple the instruc­tions were. Scratch intro­duces cod­ing in a fun and inter­ac­tive way, using plain lan­guage and sim­ple tasks to keep stu­dents play­ing and learning!

Enhancing Learning & Fun

The one thing that real­ly made Scratch stand out for me was how easy it made it to learn cod­ing. Most of the time I for­got I was even using code as I pro­gressed through the lev­els of each game. I think Scratch is an amaz­ing resource to bring into the class­room to enhance learn­ing, col­lab­o­ra­tion, cre­ativ­i­ty, and fun! I would con­sid­er bring­ing a Scratch-ses­son into the class­room once a week.

Screen­shot tak­en from https://scratch.mit.edu/ideas

ACTIVITY GUIDES

The “Ideas” tab on Scratch’s home­page hosts a vari­ety of Activ­i­ty Guides to help kids brain­storm a project they want to pur­sue. Each activ­i­ty comes with its own cod­ing resources and tuto­ri­als, so kids will nev­er be dis­cour­aged by start­ing a project that is too dif­fi­cult or out of their reach! This is a real­ly great fea­ture to increase acces­si­bil­i­ty and kid engage­ment in their program.

ANIMATE A NAME ACTIVITY

I tried out the tuto­r­i­al ver­sion of the Ani­mate a Name activ­i­ty in class this week. You can watch the project I cre­at­ed to the right! (I was able to upload this video to my blog by using Screen­cas­ti­fy.) I thought this activ­i­ty was real­ly great because there are so many dif­fer­ent ways you can ani­mate your project to per­son­al­ize it to your own inter­ests. The pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less here, and the pro­gram was rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple to fig­ure out. I think this is an amaz­ing strat­e­gy to bring cod­ing into the classroom.

Ani­mate a Name project cre­at­ed on Scratch.
Par­ent reviews for Scratch on commonsensemedia.org

Scratch is the ABSOLUTE BEST!!!!!

Scratch is a awe­some web­site. This web­site helps chil­dren to be con­fi­dent through­out online com­mu­ni­ty! This also helps kids to learn a lot of cod­ing. The friend­ly peo­ple who takes care of the com­mu­ni­ty called Scratch Team makes stu­dios that inspire oth­ers to code. This web­site is my favorite web­site in the universe!

Kid, 10 years old
Review from Com­mon­sense­me­dia

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