#coding to learn

[rayferaday]

Coding with Scratch on the Smart Board

"Starting with Scratch" (scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tip_bar=getStarted), our first foray into the Scratch visual block programming language today. Thanks to the Smart Board, it was everything I'd hoped it would be.

I'm teaching summer school with 75 special needs students, facing a variety of challenges. A number are on the autism spectrum. They are arranged in a rotation of 5 classes of about 15 students, and the course is running just short of 4 weeks, but there are only about 14 teaching days, what with dances, movies and "The Play". Only two students, both from my regular day program, have any previous experience with coding, and that was brief. My own experience with coding is very minimal. I'm not in any way a programmer! We started with 3 days of "unplugged" exercises, colouring pixel art, mostly to keep from freaking out the adults helping with the kids. Last week we went through the 20 mini-tutorials of the Hour of Code - Maze Activity. Today though, was coding in earnest, even though we were only copying out a program. We were using the full Scratch 2.0 language and not just a subset of commands. My goal in choosing computer programming as a course focus, was not so much to have the students learn coding, as it was to use coding to learn. Our primary objective today was engagement. I wanted to start a conversation with the kids around the Smart Board, about the activity and have them join in with each doing a step in building part of the program. They would then do the whole activity themselves and hopefully collaborate.

The Smart Board turned out to be an amazing vehicle for fostering interaction and collaboration. During the teacher lead explanation of the activity, pretty well every student in the class joined in to complete the animation of the dancing Scratch cat. A number of students were able to overcome physical challenges by using a pointer as a stylus.

I was especially pleased when the students broke to work on the assignment. Besides working on individual computers, some of the students worked as a group using the Smart Board. In a couple of the classes, students who had been difficult to motivate to work, offered to lead the activity with more challenged students. It was amazing and really gratifying to see these students lead their peers through the exercise.

[rayferaday]

Hour of Code - Teaching MEDD/AU: counting, left from right, sequential instructions.

The Hour of Code Maze Activity is turning out to be a great vehicle to teach special needs students concepts like: counting, distinguishing left from right, and as a way to put simple instructions into a sequence. I've been teaching 60-70 special needs students at the TCDSB summer school at James Cardinal McGuigan C.S.S. We started last Wednesday with an "unplugged" activity, translating matrices of numbers on graph paper into pixel art. On Monday we moved on to "Hour of Code" activities at learn.code.org, specifically Stage 2: The Maze. The Maze uses a web based, visual, block coding language, called Blockly, to guide a character through a maze. The characters are taken from the popular Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies games. The language uses representational coding blocks you drag and drop to provide instructions to move the characters. In concept, it reminds me a lot of visual communication systems that use symbol pictures to allow our non-verbal students to communicate. Blockly is from the same family of computer languages as MIT's Scratch (scratch.mit.edu).

The students I'm teaching face a wide variety of behavioural, physical and cognitive challenges, and yet virtually every one of them has been able to participate in these tutorials, albeit some need guidance and assistance to do so. On the other hand, some are beating the pants off of the adults involved, in the speed at which they are learning this activity. Through guided questioning, this young lady in the wheelchair pictured below, has been able to guide her Educational Assistants through the exercises. She found some of the difficulties the adults were having a little amusing.

The concepts the kids are learning include counting and distinguishing left from right. They are also required to figure out the order in which the instructions the characters follow, must be placed. You can guide the students through this by adding one instruction at a time and then running the code (instructions). Figure out the next step and then add that instructional block and run them again, building the instructional stack one step at a time. Have the kids deliberately make errors. It relieves tension, because it's funny, and it helps them learn. Have the kids collaborate and copy. This is also an activity that can be done as a group using a Smart Board. Have them discuss and plan out the moves. Divide up the jobs such as placing the coding blocks and pressing "run".

[rayferaday]

Coding to Learn

The movement to teach kids coding may have been born of nostalgia for the wide open days of hacking in the 70s and 80s, or of a business agenda and fear of technological obsolescence in the 21st century, but there are also solid pedagogical reasons for it. The TCDSB 21st Century Learning & AICT group has identified 6 Competencies for 21st Century Learning: Communication, Collaboration, Self-Regulation, Knowledge Construction, Creative Problem Solving & Innovation, and Use of ICT for Learning. These skills are familiar to me as a Spec. Ed. Teacher teaching students with special needs, including students on the Autism Spectrum, many of whom are non-verbal. These are the skills that Psychologists, Speech and Language Pathologists, and other professionals typically identify as the key foci for academic programming for these students. In his TED Talk, Mitch Resnick from MIT, one of the developers of the Scratch modular programming language, has identified similar skills that children learn from coding. They learn in a meaningful context and come to realize learning is a process and not a product. They learn to break complex ideas or problems into simpler parts, to collaborate, to keep persistent and persevere in the face of difficulty. Becoming fluent with technologies allows them to open up and express themselves, to be creative and to interact with the world around them. Resnick and the MIT team's goal is not so much to have the kids learn to code as it is to USE CODING TO LEARN. Learning to code is seen as an essential 21st century literacy around the world. See: "Year of Code" in Britain, "Hour of Code" in the United States, and others. The Scratch programming language, as well as similar block programming platforms, take away the tedious concerns about programming syntax and allow the student to focus on using the computer to express themselves. New iterations of Scratch (Scratch Jr.) get away from using text altogether and just use the block symbols to communicate with the computer. I can't help drawing comparisons to the communication symbols that many non-verbal students use to augment their communication.