I decided to go with option 2 of the assigned blog posts for this week. In class we discussed coding. Before taking this course, I’m not sure if I’ve had any experience with coding. Also known as scripting or programming, coding is becoming an important skill to have these days. It is simply the method of communicating with a computer— programming languages that give the software instruction to perform a specific function.
A huge amount of the the population are making a living by computer programming on various platforms (iOS and Android, etc).
Outside of the professional world, coding provides children (and/or students) with some very important skills— as well as a way of looking at the world. They can learn problem solving and critical thinking skills, discover future job opportunities, and even broaden their imagination.
I decided to check out Hour of Code (the T-rex game). It gives you step-by-step instructions on how to start the basics of a coding project. There were nine steps to the program that I chose. Basically the website showed me how to code a simple coin-run video game. I chose this one purely by the fact that its character was a dinosaur (no shame).
Since this game is targeted toward students at a grade three level, it was pretty simple and easy to follow along. I can imagine that my seven year old self would have thought that coding was fun if this was the way I would have been introduced to it at that age—
You may need to have quite a bit of patience if you are interested in learning how to code– as it is tedious. You need to give your computer extremely specific instruction. It will only do EXACTLY what you tell it to do, so if you’re new— it might be a little time consuming. BUT that being said, coding definitely teaches you patience. Which is something I might need a little bit more of, haha! My favourite part was definitely turning my dinosaur purple.