Coding Craze

For this week’s blog, I dove into the world of coding. This is something that was completely new to me on a variety of levels, as every time I think of coding I think of people who are developing like multimillion-dollar apps and/or game. Or I think of Penelope Garcia off of Criminal mMinds when she is typing insanely fast and all her monitors are just pulling up things left, right and center. My experience in this new-found world, was extremely less overwhelming than that.

I started this new venture with option 2, from this week’s selection. Overall, the basic lay out of code.org was very user friendly and easy to follow along with. This I believe made the whole usual dreaded feeling of stepping into the unknown start to diminish. Which I think as educators plays a huge impact on the overall engagement, and productivity you receive back from students when activities feel less intimidating.

A couple cool new tricks I learned while doing this activity revolved around the idea of “work smarter, not harder” being able to put in loops in. As well as a part of the loops, there was a level, at the end of the game. Where you put in two loops that did the same thing, but if you differentiated it by the individual icons (monkey, or rabbit) or (banana, or carrot) it would provide the right smoothie to that character. Which is something that I found interesting because as educators imagine being able to have an app that you would be able to make the students their own individualized loops, that would adapt to any modifications they may need (speech to text, extended due dates ect.)

Overall, I think the concept of coding is quite interesting, something that I wish I had gotten into while I was younger. As we all know in today’s society knowing how to use technology and knowing how to use it proficiently is extremely important in a vast majority of ways.  This blog post, I found about coding within the classroom, has a section focusing on the “why” of teaching coding in the classroom. Which I found interesting to read and adjust my thinking too.

Thanks for reading!