Today, Rich McCue paid us a visit to teach us about coding.

We covered the coding technology competency.

While it is in no means necessary to be a master at coding, it is important that teachers understand what coding is as it is an extremely valuable tool and likely an interest to many students. For many students, children will not come to learn what coding is if it is not introduced to them in school. As educators, it is our responsibility to try and expose our students to the many different tools and varied opportunities to learn.

We were introduced to Scratch, Grasshopper, and Hour of Code, as well as several other resources that can be used to teach students basic coding skills.

Through using Scratch, I had some ideas about how coding could be useful for students to demonstrate learning as an alternative to making videos or diagrams for projects. Like Minecraft, coding can be a great tool towards fueling more inquiry-based practices. Coding helps students with their mathematical abilities as they practice working with patterns, as well as have many other cross-curricular potentials.

I used Scratch to code this little video of people singing and dancing to Whitney Houston:

-Jess