Coding, a New Literacy

Coding is something more and more teachers are trying to incorporate in their classroom, or have at least thought about incorporating coding in their class, but how? To teach coding in your class you do not need to be an expert computer programmer, all you need to do is be able to provide your students with resources they need so they can explore and find their own way through the coding process. Tools are not the issue. There are a variety of tools at your disposal for FREE!

Khan Academy has an intro to coding course, as well as Code Academy, Code.org and Tynker.com (the list goes on and on). More importantly you (the teacher) need to somewhat familiarize yourself with the concepts, and goals of coding. Find a free coding site that relates to what you are doing in your classroom! This Code-by-math site is something I am currently exploring to hopefully utilize next school year, where students are relating math concepts to parts of code.

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Why is coding important?

Coding is a new form of literacy, which you can read about in this Edutopia Article which lists 5 reasons why every student should code. What I mean by new literacy is that coding is a language in its own (quite a few languages on its own but that's besides the point) and in order for today's students to be adequately prepared for the future, coding is a must. Coding is not just something static, it is a way for your students to think divergently, where each student is problem solving to get to a similar end-goal.

The article referenced earlier also claims that coding can improve educational equity. How? If every school was required to teach coding, there wouldn't be groups or schools (specifically low income schools) missing out on what looks to be a required skill for the future. We are preparing children to be career and college ready, but if we are not teaching them a skill that is a must-have in the future, we are doing the students an injustice. In order for this to happen, schools need to have the sufficient funds for the technology to allow for this type of work (coding) to occur.

HERE is an very useful Beginner's guide to bring coding into your classroom (brought to you by Edsurge), which provided extensive resources, as well as videos, PD offerings. I will keep looking through these resources, playing with the different coding websites, and figuring out which one works best for me and my students. Last year during the Hour of Code week I tried Tynker out with my classes, and they loved it. What is had them do was try and manipulate a dragon through a maze by blocking pieces of code together. The students did an awesome job with it, and as much as I thought they would be challenged early on, they breezed right through the early stages and didn't struggle until later on. That productive struggle is what leads to in-depth learning, and coding provides our students just that!