Adventures in Coding

 I can code. In my school library, students explored MicroBits and Bloxels. I was on the STEAM Family Evening Planing Committee at my school. I've even helped offer workshops on coding last March under the leadership of the incomparable Peter Skillen and Code to Learn. 

Coding is now a part of the revised Ontario math curriculum.  I chose to focus on coding for two weeks with my students because I thought it might be easier to address coding while we all had technology at our fingertips everyday and less need for dividing into the different grades for math class. In principle, this was a good idea. Teaching coding on your own through virtual schooling to meet curriculum expectations is an entirely different matter. I forgot everything I knew. I floundered. Then I reached out to friends.

Diana Hale and Farah Wadia gave me some advice and links. I signed up for CSFirst (Computer Science First) which is a partnerships with Google. I created a teacher account, selected a pre-made project to assign my class, and jumped in.

Today is the last day of our coding unit in math. Every student will be given two minutes to share the results of their coding journey. I was very pleased with the results. Here's why.

1) The students led the learning.

The student interface is quite different from the teacher interface. Don't get me wrong; I appreciated the teacher view, especially where it tracked the progress of the students as they worked through the tasks. However, our students were the ones who brought up problems and then solved them. Our math class started to form into a predictable pattern - after the morning exercises (anthem / land acknowledgement / attendance - all requested by the students to keep things as "school-like" as possible), the floor would be open for students to ask for help from others on portions of their coding that they were stuck on. Other students would chime in, describing potential solutions. Some students exited the Google Meet because it was too laggy to remain on while coding in Scratch, while others stayed in the Google Meet and worked on another tab. We'd all reconvene ten minutes before the end of the double period to share any successes and share any further issues. My role was to facilitate the conversations, offer lost passwords, and check progress.

2) Some students who usually dislike math enjoyed and embraced coding.

Some of the students really got into coding. Many finished early and it was a team of students that selected the second required assignment. I didn't want to overdue things by assigning a third, so I suggested to students who were still completing assignments ahead of time to select other challenges on the website to do. One student decided to invent his own game. The great thing was that it wasn't always the "typical high-flyers" that did well in this coding unit.

Here are some of the projects that students have created. (I chose to highlight samples that do not include student names.)