Week 11 Reflection

In today’s class, we reviewed resources for coding with students. This was something I am completely unfamiliar with and was unaware of how common it’s becoming in the Elementary setting. I had never before considered the educational benefits of learning to code and how it can be used to develop problem-solving and computational thinking skills, key ideas in the BC curriculum. We had the option to choose from a few different coding resources for students and try using them for ourselves. Over reading break, I have borrowed my mother’s iPad from her work as an Elementary EA, so I decided to try out Scratch Jr (which was already downloaded). I was surprised how easily I found the program to use after playing around with it for a short time. I briefly looked over to the instruction manual and quickly learned how to add characters, change the background, manipulate the characters and even record a short video clip (link included at the bottom).  At first, the idea of learning to code seemed kind of irrelevant to me, but after Scratch Jr, I can really see the educational benefits of this kind of resource. This application allows students to use critical thinking skills in a creative and engaging way students may thoroughly enjoy.