How to Teach Coding

When deciding how to implement coding in your classroom, various factors may influence how you and your students engage with coding concepts to create, tinker with, or adapt codes. Depending on the availability of resources, students' background knowledge, and the curriculum expectations being addressed, teachers can decide to facilitate either "unplugged" or "plugged" coding:

The ScratchEd Harvard Team also developed three approaches for assessing computational thinking:

1. Artifact-Based Interviews where learners are given the opportunity to discuss their process in designing, creating, and modifying their products. Teachers can use this Interview Protocol to prompt students' communication and thinking of key design events and points during their process. Refer to the Assessing Development of Computational Practices Rubric (click on the rubric below) to assess students' fluency of computational practices including: experimenting, testing/debugging, reusing/remixing, and abstracting

2. Design Scenarios where students use pre-existing Scratch programs (click here to view) to complete the following tasks: explain what the project does; describe how to extend the project; fix a bug in the code; and add a feature to remix the project.

3. Learner Documentation where students reflect on their learning and the key design and implementation decisions through digital (click here to view a sample) or hard learning journals (click the image below to view), or by annotating their code using Scratch's built-in commenting feature.

💡 Select coding activities and design lessons with your students' interests and learning strengths in mind to keep them motivated and engaged.

💡 Facilitate a growth mindset amongst students and provide a learning environment where they can work at their own pace. This encourages resilience, problem-solving, and risk-taking - which are all skills required to successfully code and overcome challenges!

💡 Promote a collaborative environment where students are encouraged to support each other. Assign the students who are working ahead or who have a good grasp of the activity as student leaders for the lesson/period. They can rotate around the class to help other students, which helps you address questions and reach more students at once.

💡 Engage in collaborative professional discussion and learning with other teacher colleagues to continue to develop your own professional knowledge and practice on coding.

💡 Learn alongside your students and colleagues! Use these opportunities to model a growth mindset to your students by showing them how you learn new things and how you respond to challenges.

💡 Have FUN and encourage students' creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration skills to flourish!