This week, I dove into some coding. During our weekly lecture, we were shown a website called Code.org. On their website, there are activities that are categorized as an “hour of code.” These activities are typically designed to be completed in an hour, and there are tons of them. You can sort the activities by topic, grade, classroom technology, length, language, and activity type. The goal of this website is to give kids an opportunity to learn some basic coding, and the great thing about this website is there are even some activities for classrooms where students do not have access to computers. I did some searching, and I tried a couple of the different activities but nothing really piqued my interest until I came across an activity called “Learn to Code with Crossy Road,” which is intended for students in grade 9+.
I remembered playing the Crossy Road mobile game when I was in high school, so I knew this was the one to sync some time into. This activity is designed to be more than an hour’s worth of coding as there are 5 different programs to choose from: algorithms and sequencing, inputs and outputs, loops and iteration, selection and if-statements, and comparative operators. I chose inputs and outputs. The goal of this course is to program inputs and outputs to move the chicken safely to its goal. When you first load up the activity, it asks you to move the chicken to the finish, but the keyboard does not work. That is the first task, to code the right arrow button to work so that the chicken can move. I then progressed to making the rest of the arrow keys work, programming the WASD keys to move the chicken, and then I did some debugging in the later levels.
I actually found it quite fun to work through these levels. It was interesting to see how the game would react after I did my coding. When I was successful, the game would work how it was supposed to. But when I did something wrong, the chicken would not correctly respond to my actions, and I would have to look over my code to troubleshoot what I did wrong. Although this “coding” was very basic, it was cool to experience a simplified version of how a computer works. There was also some discussion involving math (angles) in this course, so it would be easy and beneficial to incorporate coding into a math class. It would also be easy to incorporate into other topics as well. When I was browsing the site, I came across activities that combine coding with climate change, geography, history, science, and many others.
I do believe that coding is important. Computers and technology are a huge part of our daily lives, and I believe it is beneficial for students and the rest of society to have a basic understanding of how this technology works behind the scenes. People that learn how to code are developing skills in troubleshooting, creativity, logic, problem-solving, and math. Not only that, coding is the future, and people that know how to code are going to be highly sought after by employers now and in the future. I don’t think I could code for a living as I would hate sitting at a desk stationary all day, but doing some coding in my spare time would be a beneficial thing to learn.
Here are some great free tools to learn how to code!
Thanks for reading!