Thing 11: Coding

I am so happy to be back and to be participating in this class again! This has been one of my favorite professional development classes that I have taken and I have already learned so much I cannot wait to see what else is in store for me this year!

So this first topic is right up my alley since this year I have started to consider whether or not coding was something I was going to do with my students. I really am no coder and I did not know much about so this was perfect timing for sure! I had considered doing hour of code but decided that if I was going to do it I would do it at a later time maybe more toward the end of the year. I spent time playing around with a few of the examples that were given to us and even though at first I was not sure what I was doing I seemed to get the hang of it fairly quickly.  There are many teachers in my district who participate in Hour of Code and have been sharing things with me but it wasn’t until I actually sat down and experimented with it myself that I realized how cool it really is!

I knew right away that the Hour of Code Minecraft Game would be something that a large population of my students would love to do. Minecraft is extremely popular in my building and the students cannot get enough of it. As for the girls the Frozen one with Elsa and Ana on the code.org website I already know would be something they would go crazy for! I played around with Flappy Bird for a while and enjoyed that. What I really like about coding is that there are so many options out there and you really are able to cater to all of your students and find something that they would all be interested in. One of my favorite articles was the 17 apps to try and that is something I will be sharing with my colleagues and can maybe even reach some people who are skeptical about coding.

Using any of these tools you can show students that coding can be fun and something that they might be interested in the future to take a better look at. Who knows maybe they will be so inspired they will want to go into a computer science career! I think that including coding in school is a no brainer and that it is something I will be doing with many of my classes not only this year, but for years to come!