Computer Science Education Week is done and dusted, and the second Hour of Code has come and gone. Last week was busy! Support for
Code.org at my school this year has grown considerably, especially through the efforts of the tech coaches in the ES where every class from K-G5 did an Hour of Code!
As mentioned in my last post, I conducted three HoC events this year . . . one for parents, and two hours for HS students. I also know of a number of HS students who did at least one Hour of Code on their own during the week, so I am not discouraged by the actual numbers who showed up to do some coding with me. Here's a couple of photos from the week's events . . .
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| Small group of parents exploring coding for the first time - this was an interesting group to work with (they loved coding). |
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| First Hour of Code this year for HS students - lots of deep thinking and collaboration. |
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| My MS daughter getting in a couple hours of coding alongside the HS students - she's really into it! |
An interesting twist to this year's Hour of Code happened during and after the second student event that I held in the HS. On Friday after school, a small group of students gathered in my room to explore coding. What was unusual this time was a "new student" joined us . . . let's call him Mikey. Mikey is actually our HS Principal who was experiencing a "Day in the Life" of a G10 student for the day, which included going to an after school activity. I had actually spent the entire day filming Mikey as he went through his day, and then did double-duty filming and hosting the HoC at the same time. Mikey really enjoyed his coding experience - he went through the Flappy Birds tutorial and built his own game. You can see in the image below that he finished the tutorial and earned his HoC certificate.
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| Mikey completing the Flappy Birds tutorial and earning his Hour of Code certificate. |
What was also particularly interesting this year, came at the end of this second student HoC. When everyone was packing up to leave and head home for the weekend, a bunch of the G11-12 students wanted to talk more about coding classes in our school, what they could do to learn more, and what should they be thinking about if they wanted to pursue programming in post-secondary school. All great topics, worthy of spending more time on. As my school has phased out the IB Diploma Computer Science course (
as explained in this previous post), this conversation turned to alternative avenues for these students to learn more. They were obviously hungry to learn, ready to delve into programming in a deep way, and asking all of the right questions. The end result? This group of students is going to self-form a new Coding Club which we will start in the new year, where we will jump into programming topics that I will draw from IB DP CS and AP CS courses. I can see the club working through topics such as data representation and how the CPU works, working with some machine & assembly language simulators (knob and switch computers), programming in Python (using
Alice 3D), and getting into some Java as well (
Greenfoot and my favourite - the Greeps Challenge, plus
BlueJay). Mikey was part of this whole conversation, and it confirmed what we have been talking about for awhile now - that we need to update and change our elective offerings to include computer programming and computation thinking, even if we do not go back to offering the IB DP CS course. There is obviously a need and a desire for doing programming - we just don't have the elective courses right now for these students to take. In the meantime, a computing club will fill some of this need but it really needs to be a course for credit.
At your school, do you offer computer programming courses? IB DP CS or AP CS or some other curriculum? Do you have a coding club? How are you preparing students who want to pursue their studies in computer science, programming, electrical engineering, computer architecture, etc.?
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| One of my HoC certificates from this year's events - thanks to Code.org! |
