Most 12-year-old's love playing video games and Thomas Suarez is no different. Thomas taught himself how to create them. After developing iPhone apps like "Bustin Jeiber," a whack-able-mole game that went crazy in the app world. Thomas is now using his skills to help other kids become developers.
Professional Development for Teachers
Coding is part of the curriculum which is relatively new and often a part which teachers struggle with. I have created this resource to demonstrate resources which you might use to teach Year 5-6 students. The tasks provided can be adapted or modified for other year levels.
If you think about it, what are kids doing today? They are all over Technology and enjoy using it everyday! So why not put that to good use and encorage our students to use their skills to interact in coding to make apps.
INTRODUCTION
As educators we all understand the importance of hands-on activities and the impact it makes on students learning. Hands-on activites let the students' minds grow and learn based on the experiences and the environment they are exposed to. Students learn while discussing, investigating, creating, and discovering with other students. As the students become familiar with the subject they are learning, they begin to make decisions allowing more interactive learning experiences to occur (Cooperstein & Kocevar-Weidinger, 2004).
The three lesson plans below provide a differientiated example for thoes students who may really struggle when it comes to technology. Above we have addressed a number of different online games that encourage and allow the students to trial and experiment with coding.
Throughout these lessons the students will not only engage in concepts from the Digital Technologies strand but will also engage in various contexts of literacy and numeracy aspects that require an understanding of systems thinking and critical and creative thinking. These are supported through engaging in small collaborative groups where lessons offer differentiation to support personal management, behaviours, social interactions and core learning outcomes.
CODE.ORG
Code.org is a non-profit organisation dedicated to expanding access to computer science. Their vision is that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer science. They believe computer science should be part of core curriculum. Throughout the activities on Code.org the students will engage in computational thinking such as; decomposition, pattern location, abstraction and algorithms in order to define and solve problems.
Click on "Course 4" and then select "Try now" to see how the game actively engages students and encourages them to create their own algorithms.
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HANDS-ON LESSONS
INCORPERATING TECHNOLOGY
Below are a selections of on-line that have been sourced from numerous parties. Each link is intended to enable access to the resource and acknowledge the source of the resource/information. These link are to provide you with a varitey of ideas that can be incorperated into the planning of a unit and can encourage yourself and your students to use technology in learning.
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SCRATCH
Scratch uses a drag and drop programming language and can be played online for free. The software for Scratch can also be downloaded for free! By using scratch you are able to program your own interactive stories, games and animations. Scratch helps students to learn and to think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively, but you want to know the best part?
Scratch has FREE lesson plans for the teachers! These lesson plans can be downloaded and have simple instructions to follow. The first part of every lesson involves a teacher demonstration or playing of one of the videos which is then followed on by the students exploring Scratch and developing their own projects.
Here is an example of the downloadable lessons.
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HACKETY HACK!
Hackety Hack will teach you the absolute basics of programming from the ground up. No previous programming experience is needed and with Hackety Hack, you'll learn the Ruby programming language. Ruby is used for all kinds of programs, including desktop applications and websites.
Hackety Hack uses the Shoes toolkit to make it really easy and fun to build graphical interfaces. Several lessons and example programs are provided, showing you how to make all kinds of fun things! You are also able to check out what other people are doing with Hackety Hack as the Programs section is chock-a-block full of fun projects from other Hackety users. When you have finished with your program, you can even upload your own! Put your account information into the Hackety Hack app, and you'll be able to share all the programs you create.
I hope that after engaging in these coding activities and browsing other resources you have gained an understanding of how simple it is to encourage the use of coding within your classroom.