I love coding. I do! I am surrounded by people who learned coding or work as programmer and I really find that frame of mind to be fascinating.
I have done a couple of workshops like Django Girls or Ladies learning to code before, but I didn’t like their approach which was mostly making us copy and paste lines of codes. I didn’t understand fully how it worked. Yes, I may have had a web page done at the end of it, but I was not able to tell you what I did or why I did it.
This is why I liked today’s lesson. Those are all tools I could see myself using:
- Scratch
- Grasshopper
- Hour of code
- Code BC
I believe that knowing those tools can me a better teacher because I could have resources to give to my students when they show interest in STEM. I also think that even though most of those tools are in English, they might have language settings I could play with. Also, maybe I could invite my students to create something to showcase something they learned in French.
Finally, I have to say that my favorite tool is definitely Codecademy. In the past, I have used it to learn HTLM5 and it was really fun, engaging, and hands on. It really allowed me to understand how it worked and I felt like I had just enough support to still feel challenged intellectually. It was also really well scaffolded and I liked how the lessons were prepared. It inspired me in my own lesson because it is really practical.
These days, I use it to learn the Basics of Programming to better understand the mind frame behind it. I noticed that people who codes have a different way of approaching projects and problems: they have an eye for detail but they also see the big pictures. They break down problems and analyze them.
I want that for myself as well. I want that for my students. This is why I believe that learning to code is also a way of changing the way you approach problems.
