Integrating Coding into Curriculum

Last year, I led the charge to integrate at least one computational thinking and coding activity into each of our classrooms, from JK to 9th grade. It was met with much enthusiasm among the students and a bit of skepticism among the teachers: This I attribute to their unfamiliarity with programming and perhaps some trepidation about implementing something they had not yet established a comfort level using.

In second grade, for example, students coded just one stanza of the poems they wrote. The challenge was to bring that part of their poem "to life" by coding it. Normally, they wrote the poems in their journals and drew a corresponding image, an activity which involved creatively imagining and then depicting the meaning of their poem. By giving them the opportunity to make the end product a coded product, they had to take their creativity one step beyond because they had to imagine and create the algorithm which would cause their poem to be automated. Breaking this activity down into the CT steps:

• Students first "decomposed" their poem into meaningful chunks and selected a piece they felt represented the essence of their poem.
• The poem itself represented patterns of words, and thus they had to conceptualize how one of those patterns could be represented
• The very nature of the activity was an abstraction because students had to set aside the specific details of their poems and focus on just the generalized theme
• Finally, students took to their iPads to create the code (algorithm) which would automate their poems

There were many struggles along the way, but that did not stop any of them!

Our 9th graders in their second year of Spanish were learning how to give commands. This presented a perfect opportunity to marry up the concept of giving commands to a human with giving commands to a computer! To begin, we first had the students engage in an unplugged activity where they had to "program" each other - blindfolded - to maneuver across their classroom, which was strewn with obstacles (chairs, backpacks, desks). The point of this exercise was to get the to use their Spanish commands correctly, but also to help them appreciate the importance of precise instructions. Next, students were given a storyboard to craft a story in which one character gave orders ("commands") to another. This would be the first step of organizing their algorithm sequence, and a way for the teacher to check for their understanding of the vocabulary. Finally, they took to coding their projects. For many, this was their first experience coding. They immediately established connections between the importance of details, sequencing and instructions, and had a new forum in which to experience the Spanish language in action.

Resources

The following resources will provide you with examples of integrated coding projects:

• ScratchED Resources
• ISTE Computational Thinking Teacher Resources
• Google's Explore Computational Thinking

With your new-found coding skills, and the examples you've reviewed, take some time to reflect on some ideas of how you might integrate a coding project into your classroom. What examples or ideas inspired you even further? You will add your ideas to your Affordances & Constraints Journal in 8.4.