Learning about coding in class today was a blast! It is cool to see how creative you can get with making games and learning resources when you begin to get a bit more familiar with coding!

For now, I started with baby steps by customizing the Flappy Bird game to make a ‘Swimmy Shark‘ game! Next, I want to try experimenting with creating something more unique! Developing this game was honestly very easy and fun to customize! I really like how the interface is so user-friendly and gives the step-by-step instructions so that anyone can participate-even if they are not well versed in coding. One thing is for certain: if I can do this, my grade 6 practicum students should be able to do it too!

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Hearing the story about the goat condo was a good reminder to implement a variety of different projects and subjects in a coding context. When students see the application in what they are learning, they are going to be able to grasp the concepts and be more interested in them! When I was in school, I never really saw the application in most math subjects, and it just goats to show (ha-ha) that with effective context math can not only be applicable for students, but engaging as well!

My Swimmy Shark game!

Thinking about the application of math in the classroom and projects/problem solving, I wonder if I can start thinking of a year-long project that could be used for this purpose. I know I would need to get it approved by admin and probably others… but how cool would it be to create something over the course of a school year that incorporates a lot of different math concepts as well as modeling or coding? It makes me think about the documentary we watched earlier on the technology institute for high school students when they had long-term projects that they worked on to complete to show their families. I am going to put some brainstormed ideas below (these are just off the top of my head…)

  • School garden beds (area, perimeter, plant spacing etc.)
  • Wind vane (math and science concepts)
  • Class-made morning message games (customized wordle with science terms or terms for other subjects?)
  • Coding related to science dissections online

The other day, we were lucky to have Science Venture come to our science classroom to teach us about coding with micro bits and sphere robots! I thought it connected really closely to what we learned about when using scratch, and it showed another aspect of how to incorporate coding into the curriculum in subjects other than math! I thought this was really useful and I might try using microbits in my grade 6 practicum (if SD62 schools have them on-hand)! Coding has also been used to help with developing technology for voice-to-text and other areas of equitability and accessible technology, so I think that if this is discussed with students, it could be quite inspiring! I had a grade 6 student in my observation class do a bunch of coding on their google browser and little characters would start falling around the screen. Now, I have no idea how they did this, but it just shows the capability of thee students! This student in particular loved coding but had a general distaste for school, so when I told them that there are lots of career opportunities that involve coding, they seemed to really light up! I think sometimes coding is solely associated with video games which sometimes get a bad reputation from parents and teachers, but I have learned how much strategy is involved, and if a student develops their own? Even better!

Thank you for stopping by! Please feel free to leave a comment, I would love to hear your thoughts!

Ms. J