Look At Me Code

Coding has become more popular in the last few years for a variety of reasons. As we discussed in class there are more potential jobs in this field than ever before, but there are other benefits for students who learn about coding. This is explained in more detail in the article 8 reasons why every child should learn to code. With all of this information it make sense that as teachers we get familiar with coding ourselves and make sure that we include opportunities to code in our classrooms.

While working as an EA I have seen a couple of different coding sites including Scratch and Hour of Code as well as I have seen students as young as grade one explore coding bots. The best experience that I had with a coding site was when the students received a workshop with a presenter who was trained to show the students how to use the Scratch program. It was great to see the teacher learning right along with her students.

For this post I decided to try the Hour of Code because it was the one that I was less familiar with. I signed up and started looking through the options that I could try as a beginner. I decided to try the artist tutorial. I thought that it would be neat to have the freedom to draw whatever I wanted. As you can see from the picture, it starts out pretty simple. It goes through the commands required to draw straight lines and to turn 90 degrees, which creates a square.

As the lessons progressed, the difficulty increased. I had to figure out what angle to turn at, which way to turn, and how many pixels to make it draw. Although it was walking through it in steps I still got mixed up and had to try it and fix it and try it and fix it until I would finally get it right. I actually found it a bit frustrating. I think that this would also frustrate some students but I think it would be a good lesson in learning from mistakes and how to persevere through frustration.

The tutorial then made additions to the commands like the function line and jumping. The function code is a set of commands to do something specific and then you can use it over and over without having to put every single line of code in each time. The jump command made it so that you could skip spaces without having to draw a line. I actually was starting to feel pretty confident and then I started to try and create my own drawing. Let me just say that my final drawing took me way longer to create than I would like to admit. In the video below you will see a short screencast of my hour of code project.

Once I completed my project and the tutorial I felt like I had a better understanding of coding. I think that there are many subject areas that it would be useful in. A few examples would be learning about sequencing and and angles in Math. This specific one could be used in both Art and ELA. I know that programs like these will be helpful in teaching students about code starting at an early age. It will be exciting to see what my students will be able to create.