Digital Learning challenges!

a) Ideas to use generic software such as Word to teach abstraction
b) Ideas to teach coding at the Learn Code website
c) Interactive activities to learn about the components of a computer, and a network
d) A video to help you understand the internet
Document your learning journey in your blog as you work through these activities.

You are asked to reflect on your proposed approaches to teach coding in your own classroom.

Code Monster website  How to draw shapes by manipulating code. This is block coding, representing shapes and colours.

Khan Academy

Code.org Resources to help teach code, 'unplugged' without the need for a computer.

Unplugged lessons in computer science for students aged 9-14.

Coding lessons for younger students (Disney, angry birds, robot vocabulary, light bot, code combat, flappy bird,

This website, by Edutopia has many internal links to help children code even from 5 years of age. This is great for early childhood practice.

I chose to use the Angry Birds challenge because it is intended for children from four years of age, and I am an early childhood specialist, so this is where I will concentrate. This challenge uses 'blockly' which is creating code under the guise of print that you can move and drop..

On the screen you have the 'maze' on the left, the 'toolbox' in the middle and the 'workspace' on the left. The literacy demands of the task would require assistance, as would the non linear aspects of reading and working within this space. The icons and processes would need to be explicitly taught first.

The tutorial allows a child to complete lines of coding that are very simple, first. These are 'move forward' functions. Then turns were incorporated, as well as avoiding objects in the way. Mistakes on coding can be corrected very easily.Students can change their turn block to left or right. The students are introduced to the repeat block after doing over 20 lines of coding.

Year 3 and 4

 Digital Technologies Processes and Production Skills

Content Description

Define simple problems, and describe and follow a sequence of steps and decisions (algorithms) needed to solve them.

Elaborations

• explaining what the problem is and some features of the problem, such as what need is associated with the problem, who has the problem and why describing, using drawings, pictures and text, the sequence of steps and decisions in a solution, for example to show the order of events in a game and the decisions that a player must make
• experimenting with different ways of describing a set of instructions, for example writing two versions of the same simple set of instructions for a programmable robotic device
• explaining to others how to follow technical instructions, for example how to capture and download images from a mobile device
• defining and describing the sequence of steps needed to incorporate multiple types of data in a solution, for example sequencing the steps in selecting and downloading images and audio to create a book trailer

I would use the Angry Birds tutorials in small groups, each with laptops or Ipads. These groups would complete the first few examples of coding and then design a mud map of the game block and write sentences about the steps they took, how they coded the steps and what the outcome was. This in sense, would be to show their computational thinking skills when the students have to decide what critical pieces of information to code into the system to reach the pig. The students would need to show the alogithim they used to complete the task.

[Write the directions] Student pairs deconstruct
the pathway into segments and build the directions from what they see.
Highlight Problem Decomposition: Break down task into smaller, manageable parts.
[Find an alternative way] Tolerance for ambiguity.
[Evaluate the pathway] Looking at alternative options requires students to analyze possible
solutions that are most efficient.
[Do other tasks] Students can generalize and transfer this experience of creating directions to
other situations in which skills are required.