Frustrating. That is my word of the day, or rather word of the last hour of my life of which I will never get back. With pretty much zero knowledge of Code and how it works I decided to be brave and do something I love to do…bake a cake, well sort of. I decided to be brave and I chose Bake A Cake with HTML at a grade 6-8 level. I figured that HTML would be the most useful to learn as it may help me with my edusites blog in the future.
Here is a beginning video of my attempts as baking a cake with HTML
While I learnt the basics, the things that I struggled with were where and when to put the quotation marks, leave spaces or insert dashes. I found this code to be overly particular. I have to re watch the videos in each step at least 2-3 times in order to correct my errors and understand what I did wrong. I would then continue feeling like, “yup I got this now” for about 10 seconds. Then I would hit another road block and become frustrated all over again. I spent over an hour working on the cake project and embarrassingly I only got to about the half way point. Did anyone else find this process extremely frustrating?
I think I’ll stick to making real cakes instead, well actually I don’t even enjoy making real cakes, as they are far to detail orientated. But I’ll tell you what if I ever need coding done I will bribe someone who can code with my homemade cinnamon buns or bite sized cheesecakes as a reward to do it for me! If you had to pick between cinnamon buns or cheesecake, what would it be?
In all seriousness I do see the importance of coding as I know that it is an essential part of our ever evolving technology. I do plan to use the resources that have been given to us in this class to expose my students to the world of coding. I believe that these game based activities are highly motivating to children and have a-lot to offer them in their learning process.
In conclusion, I acknowledge that not only are there amazing job opportunities out there for those who enjoy and excel in coding, but to understand the language our technology speaks in is empowering. I would imagine it will one day be as important as digital literacy, I just hope that day doesn’t come until after I am gone or I will be in big trouble…….
I agree coding is not for everyone. It really is not for me either I do not have the best problem-solving skills. I agree though coding is very important especially for the future. We as teachers do need to include coding in the curriculum, since as you mentioned it is a big part of our future.
It takes a really long time to get into HTML, especially if you’re just starting! However, HTML can be great if you’re trying to make a website look nice, if you have a certain theme in your head, etc. But I completely agree that it is very difficult to even get started and I commend you for jumping right into writing code. There is so many rules you need to follow and so many conventions you need to remember that it gets hard with how you want to do things! With this though, it teaches students the notion of problem-solving and not giving up until it’s done how they want it! Thank you for sharing your insight!