All about school

Category: Tech Tools (page 1 of 1)

Coding

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:

https://scratch.mit.edu/

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.

Minecraft!

This class was so much fun! Who would have thought you could do so much with a game like Minecraft. This is what our society looks like now a days in terms of technological advances and using technology in classrooms and Minecraft is a perfect way to learn while using technology! On my Wednesday visits i quickly realized that a strong interest the class shared was in Minecraft. I also realized that gaming on youtube is a huge interest of this kids. Here is one of the most popular Minecraft youtubers:https://www.youtube.com/user/TheDiamondMinecart

Here is one of his most viewed videos:

This video of his has 2.4 MILLION views on meaning 2.4 million people have watched it. This is a crazy number to think about and i can bet that most of those 2.4 million were young kids.

 

I havent seen much of Minecraft being incorporated into education but what these young students were talking about it sounds like SD61 has successfully done just that. I thought this was the coolest part about the whole class: One of the students we had with us today said that they used Minecraft to create an ancient world for social class. They were in survival mode so they had to sleep, eat, and fend off predators which i thought was so cool. Thats just one of the ways this game could incorporated into schools and classes but i think its a pretty good example of how far you could take this.

This is the resource they use, it is called Minecraft EDU:https://education.minecraft.net/

Here is a youtube video outlining how Mincraft EDU works: