We had Rich McCue come into our class today again and this time he was speaking about coding! I have a little bit of experience in coding. I took CSC 100 and we were required to do a lot of assignments centred around web design and using cyberduck.
In Rich’s blog post he outlined a couple different coding programs used in classrooms right now. His blog is linked here: https://richmccue.com
An this specific blog post is linked here:https://richmccue.com/2019/11/22/introduction-to-coding-4-educators/
The specific programs Rich outlined were:
- Scratch
- Grasshopper
- Hour of Code
- TinkerCad
- Code BC
We had the opportunity to use one of these programs during class time and I chose Scratch:
Here is a little video on how you can create the infamous flappy bird game on Scratch:
From my experience:
It was pretty easy to use and very fun. There is a lot of freedom to create what you want and all of the coding options allow you to do all sorts of things. Here is the link to a little animation I made:
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tutorial=getStarted
Coding in the classroom:
I can definitely see how something like scratch can be used in the classroom. The amount of things you can do on there is amazing. Since there are so many different backgrounds, characters and prompts a teacher could use this program for any class; history, science, ELA, social. It is very engaging in my opinion and I only used it for a couple minutes. I think that introducing coding into the classroom is a very good idea and it is exciting to see it being implemented. Its stuff like this that makes me excited for the future.
