Blog Post author: Margo Tripsa, Director, Curriculum and Assessment
The week of December 4th was Computer Science Education week. Vision International School, along with thousands of schools around the globe were taking the opportunity to be part of an exciting global movement last week and explored coding with students. All students grades 3 and up at VIS joined millions of students and teachers in over 180 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, during the Hour of Code week.
This is a global event that encourages students to participate in self-guided activities in order to develop their computer science skills. As a school, we decided to go with coding for Minecraft. Minecraft is an app that is widely popular and has a great impact on developing students’ design thinking. All students, elementary, middle school, and high school students, girls and boys, were highly engaged. All of the received certificates, and the first three students who finished first in each class were acknowledged as the Hour of Code Super Coders. All teachers were impressed with how much students learned from a single hour of coding! Students are encouraged to continue practicing these newly acquired skills. Some apps they could use are
Scratch (all ages, web-based)
Scratch Jr. (elementary & middle school, iPad)
Tynker (elementary & middle school, iPad)
Swift (middle school, iPad)
Code.org (all ages, web-based)
Lightbot (elementary, iPad)
There are many free resources for teaching coding. Check out the following three:
1.Hour of Code (2-min video); learn more about it Hour of Code website, or this 2-page poster
2. Code.org is a must!
3. Make a simple app in one hour – Check out Code.org’s new App Lab activity.
AppLab is a coding tool for middle and high school and is open for anyone to build JavaScript apps. Students who are ready to challenge themselves can go beyond block-based coding. The new Hour of Code tutorial helps students design a “choose your adventure” app in JavaScript or blocks. Making your own web app is a fun enterprise!
The Hour of Code has many other resources listed on their website (https://hourofcode.com/us/learn) such as Creating Your Own Google logo with coding.
If you live in Qatar, you might want to check out the Qatar National Scratch Coding Competition.
Kids of today need to understand programming languages to be prepared for future jobs. Everything involves technology today. Imagine what it will be like in 10 or 15 years!