I will admit when I found out we were going to be learning about coding this week I wasn’t very interested and was looking forward to getting it over with. I didn’t have much prior exposure to coding. It is an area that I generally lack interest in and kind of assumed that a lot of it wouldn’t make sense to me. However, by the end of this week I am finding value in teaching coding to my future students, and I even had some fun along the way!
Music Lab Jam Session
I chose to explore the Hour of Code options on Code.org. I then chose the Music Lab Jam Session since the idea of working with music sparked my interest. I begun this session with a less than enthusiastic attitude and I ended the session feeling the exact opposite. I had a great time exploring the different coding tools it introduced to me and felt like there would be great benefit for having my future students explore and learn from Hour of Code activities, specifically this one. A few things I found useful and appreciated about the Music Lab Jam Session are:
- How the lessons had people talking about how they use coding to help in their jobs in the music industry. I believe this display of real life applications shows the users (both students and adults) the possibilities that are out there.
- This tool can help hit some outcomes within the Arts Ed curriculum, specifically music, while being an effective way of engaging students who may not normally be interested in coding (Me!). Who doesn’t like music?!
- Coding helps to foster creativity, as seen in my experience with Music Jam, you can get quite creative with what you try. It also involves a lot of exploration and experimentation by trail and error.
Since Music Lab Jam Session is particularly interactive and reliant on sound I knew that describing my experience wouldn’t be the same unless I was able to create a video with sound. Enjoy!
Importance of Teaching Coding in the Classroom
As our society develops towards a more digitalized world, knowing how to code is going to be an extremely beneficial skill for our students as they grow up and begin entering the workforce, as this will be a valued skill employees will be looking for in the future job market. However, regardless of that factor, coding has many benefits in the learning process for our students now. As explained in an article about the importance of coding, the benefits of teaching children to code are the teaching of:
- Problem-Solving: Understanding how things work and using that information to create their own designs
- Resilience: Failure isn’t seen as a bad thing in coding, it is a part of the learning process and is bound to happen many times throughout the experience
- Critical Thinking: Through coding students learn to think for themselves and how to use logical thinking to problem solve.
- Creativity: Students have to experiment when coding and the instant feedback given throughout the process helps build their confidence as they develop something that is their own creation
- Math: coding involves the organizing and analyzing of data
- Learning can be fun!
As we have learned in previous weeks in regards to digital citizenship, specifically digital literacy (fake news, disinformation), it is more important than ever for us to teach our students critical thinking and problem solving. That is going to be more beneficial to them throughout their life, than learning to memorize facts. This is another great rationale for why coding is an important activity to incorporate into my future classroom.
I think coding is extremely useful for problem-solving. Especially hour of code. Some of the levels were so tricky that I wondered how a second grader could manage it lol.