Coding

You might have seen articles about "How all students need to learn how to code" or "Hour of Code" or "Why are we teaching our students how to code?"  Watch the TED Talk and Check out Hour of Code for more information on why students should learn how to code.

If you are like me and enjoy TED Talks, then you should check out this TED Talk all about teaching kids how to code Mitch Resnick: Let's teach kids to code.

If you don't have time to watch the video, here is a quote from it that I think is really good:

"...a lot of times people feel that young people today can do all sorts of things with technology. I mean, all of us have heard young people referred to as "digital natives." But actually I'm sort of skeptical about this term. I'm not so sure we should be thinking of young people as digital natives. When you really look at it, how is it that young people spend most of their time using new technologies? ...there's no doubt that young people are very comfortable and familiar browsing and chatting and texting and gaming. But that doesn't really make you fluent.  So young people today have lots of experience and lots of familiarity with interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating with new technologies and expressing themselves with new technologies. It's almost as if they can read but not write with new technologies.  And I'm really interested in seeing, how can we help young people become fluent so they can write with new technologies? And that really means that they need to be able to write their own computer programs, or code.  So, increasingly, people are starting to recognize the importance of learning to code."

I've read some of the articles about coding, and I agree that not every student NEEDS to learn how to code -- especially at a young age.  I took a class a few semesters ago called Toying with Technology and we learned how to code Lego Robots.  After we learned how to code them to do various things, we taught students at United how to code the robots and students from all over the state came to ISU to learn how to code the robots.  My mind was BLOWN at how fast these students picked up on how to code.  It was amazing!  They were doing things in an hour that had taken us weeks to learn.

December 8-14 is Computer Science Education Week.  To celebrate that, a campaign was started to get tens of millions of students across the world to participate in the Hour of Code.  The Hour of Code is a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify code and show that anybody can learn the basics.  I actually participated in this last year and was surprised how easy it is.  There are so many options including Code with Anna and Elsa and Write Your First Computer Program.  Check out http://hourofcode.com/us or http://code.org/learn and encourage your students to participate in the Hour of Code this week!  Coding can be used with people ages 4-104 so don't think you are too young or too old to learn!  There is also an iPad app that can be used: Codecademy: Code Hour.

If you would like to learn more about coding, want to add the Code Hour app to some iPads, or have any other questions about it, feel free to ask me!