Week 11: An Hour of Code!!

This week was all about an hour of code! In the past, I have watched the AVID students at my school complete an hour of code and although it’s not my “cup of tea,” I did like the problem solving aspect of it because problem solving is an important life skill. According to the School Library Journal, “With this in mind, the focus of coding education is shifting from teaching the specific skill of coding to teaching computational thinking—or the ability to follow a step-by-step process to solve a problem” (Snelling 2018). I loved this quote because they can take this skill and apply it to life as well, since Snelling goes on to say computational thinking and coding intertwine (Snelling 2018). Students get so overwhelmed with multistep directions, but coding can help them learn to break things down into smaller steps and take it one step at a time. I liked this article because it talks about just how many jobs use coding but how very little high schools offer coding as a class, so us librarians can offer it in our library! With technology always on the rise, it is important for students to code since “According to Code.org, there are more than 503,000 open computing jobs nationwide,” (Snelling 2018).

When I did the hour of code (since I am a beginner), I did the flappy bird activity first. That one was very easy, so I decided to up my game a little. I did the Anna and Elsa activity, and that one got hard for me. When my timer went off, I was stuck on level 14. Level 6 took me an awful long time, but I did it! Click here to see it! What I did like about both of these activities though, is they took it step by step and could give you hints if you needed them. These activities definitely used the four computational thinking skills, but the main one I feel like it hit on was decomposition. The article “Computational Thinking Across the Curriculum states, “With the power of decomposition, problems that seem overwhelming at first become much more approachable for students” (Sheldon, 2017). I definitely felt overwhelmed when I logged into code.org. As someone who isn’t super into coding, there was A LOT on there. When I picked my activities, I like that each level took it step by step and did one skill at a time to help ease you into harder skills.

What I also liked about this article is the advice it gave. It says, “Introduce some ambiguity in your projects, link lessons to real-world examples and evidence, and dream big” (Sheldon, 2017). I can apply this both in my classroom now and in my future library.

References

Sheldon, E. (2017, March 30). Computational thinking across the curriculum. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/computational-thinking-across-the-curriculum-eli-sheldon

Snelling, J. (2018, April 3). Don’t stress about coding: Focus shifts to teaching problem solving not computer skills. Retrieved from https://www.slj.com/?detailStory=dont-stress-coding-focus-shifts-teaching-problem-solving-not-computer-skills