ED 629 Blog 4 Coding

How to Spark Student Interest Through Coding

Teachers can use coding in a regular classroom setting? This can’t be possible, because teachers have their own set of standards that have to abide by. Although this may be true, Common Core doesn’t specify curriculum. It requires students to have knowledge of and skills they’ll need to succeed (Brookhouser & Megnin, 2016). From my readings, there are many different ways to engage students in many different content areas and grade levels. The first grade levels I'd like to discuss is K-5. In the article “Use Coding to Engage Students in Reading and Writing Lessons”, Randles (2017) list 5 reasons coding Engages K-5 students. Listed below I have embedded the articles 5 reasons, along with ideas that I think are engaging.

• Making student thinking visible- Students that are young tend to need help following directions. Coding introduces step by step thinking. Scratch is a platform that I would suggest for this concept. Teachers can look at the code students created and ask probing questions.
• Sustaining Creativity- In all of my training's to become a teacher, I was taught to facilitate learning. Coding allows for students to make mistakes, learn from them, and correct them on their own. 
• Encourage computational thinking-We live in a society now that students must think outside of the box. Coding allows students to create and identify steps to solve problems
• Fostering Future ready skills- “Students learning effectively in groups encourage each other to ask questions, explain and justify their opinions, articulate their reasoning, and elaborate and reflect upon their knowledge, thereby motivating and improving learning” (Soller, 2012, p.1). Coding allows students to create content rather than just learn it. Students are able to collaborate and communicate with peers and their teachers through coding.
• Empowering students to take action- Ultimately we want our students to be able to think critically and solve real word problems. Coding drives students to “create” something. What they create may lead to solving real world problems. One community I was unfamiliar with before this reading was Scratch Remix. Scratch remix allows students to be able to share what they created and get feedback from others in the community.

The most interesting aspects of what I learned about coding is how it can be incorporated in
STEAM. By me being a math teacher, the practices and the way the standards can be
incorporated truly excited me. One student, Sterneck confessed, She found her original
computer science courses "rigid and boring" with what amounted to too much top-down
instruction (“Coding Comes of Age”, 2017). She joined outside coding clubs to amplify her
experience in the classroom. One website in particular that she mentions is hackclub.com.
This clubs allowed students to build new things and solve problems. I would love to see how
coding can enhance the math classroom.  One strategy I found very easy to start with is The
Program Color (Brookhouser & Megnin, 2016).

Remember, “Teaching our kids to code is not about teaching them to be computer
programmers, but about giving them skills to change the world” (Brookhouser & Megnin, 2016, p. 60).

References:

 BROOKHOUSER, Kevin & Megnin, R. (2017). Code In Every Class. S.l.: EDTECH TEAM.
Coding Comes of Age. (2017, February 2). Retrieved from https://thejournal.com/Articles/2017/02/02/Coding-Comes-of-Age.aspx?Page=2.

Randles, J. (2017, September 29). Use coding to engage students in reading, writing lessons. Retrieved from https://www.iste.org/explore/Computer-Science/Use-coding-to-engage-students-in-reading,-writing-lessons.

Soller, A. (2001). Supporting Social Interaction in an Intelligent Collaborative Learning System. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education.