I’m excited to share an interview with Michele Lee of Davis Drive Middle School in Cary, NC. As you’ll read, she’s using code to enhance her Family and Consumer Science courses. We never could have imagined the inventive ways Michele and her (very engaged!) students are using Trinket. All along, they’re taking ownership over the code and developing confidence and curiosity that will propell their learning throughout their educational careers.
This is the latest in a series of periodic interviews we do with educational innovators. You can find the full list here.
You may have seen our series of How-To posts on how to install Trinkets on various websites and LMSs. By popular demand, here is a screencast about how to add a Trinket to a Weebly page. This will let you and your students use interactive code on any Weebly site, greatly enhancing your classes!
Weebly is a simple and beautiful website generator used by many schools. The site lets anyone make websites for free, so even if your school hasn’t bought the premium plan you and your students can use it to make free websites. Continue reading →
Code.org’s annual Hour of Code happens during CS Education Week is December 8 – 14, 2014. During this one week, we hope every student and teacher chooses to spend one Hour of Code in their classroom. I wanted to share some ideas and encouragement to help you get prepared.
Anyone Can Learn, Anyone Can Teach
Code.org has helped change the conversation about coding education worldwide with the simple slogan “Anyone Can Learn.” At Trinket we agree, and want to add “Anyone Can Teach!”. Just like the core skills needed for coding are critical thinking and creativity, which everyone has, the core skills needed to teach code are the same needed to teach anything: patience, empathy, and listening.
Take a moment and read through some of this code, then click the Run button. It’s OK to not understand everything at first – that’s normal! Code is a language, and like any language you don’t need to be fluent to get started.
Helpful comments like the ones in the example above are from programmer to programmer. They function a little like a Rosetta stone: they translate the code from a programming language into a human language, helping learners translate what’s happening in their heads.
Teach With Code
Students will be much more engaged with your Hour of Code if you can relate it back to the subject you’re covering in class. This is what we mean when we say Teach With Code. Code is a tool for you and your students to express ideas. Showing them how it can relate to ideas that are familiar to them will help it sink in.
The biggest predictor of success in learning to code is persistence. Different students will have different barriers to overcome when they run into errors or something they don’t understand. Just like teaching anything, explicitly mentioning how to identify and overcome these feelings can help your students move forward, especially those students who have cultural or self-image barriers keeping them from believing they can be successful with code.
Have Fun!
We’ve heard from teachers that bringing code into the classroom can be incredibly rewarding- especially as students learn new things and begin to teach each other. Give students space to show off their work. This will help them teach you and their peers what they’ve learned and make code a real part of your classroom culture.
Most of all, have fun and enjoy opening up these new possibilities with your students!
One of the core things we do as teachers is show interesting things to students, inciting curiosity and motivating learning. Teaching code is no different, yet showing code to students can be needlessly difficult. Here are four tips for showing your students code we’ve learned from observing teachers in the classroom.
1. Be clear about *which* code you’re showing
There’re so many details in code. It can be quite difficult for students to actually see which thing you’re talking about, like showing them a picture of a forest to teach about tree frogs. Highlight the ‘treefrog’ by isolating the concept you’re talking about. For instance, in this example it’s difficult to know what to pay attention to:
Pulling the key variables to the top and adding comments makes it much clearer, even if it adds detail:
Try changing any of the numbers and see what happens. Can you make a symmetrical shape with 5 pentagons?
This second example is both more easily accessible to students – they can change the numbers at the top and see the differences immediately – and more rewarding of sustained inquiry. The improved example can motivate a discussion of for loops, variables, and even coordinate plane Geometry.
2. Your screen should look like their screen
Context switching makes learning harder. Make sure that the setup you have is exactly like what the students will see on their computers. This means your code editor should be exactly like theirs, and customization kept to a minimum. Small changes like custom colors or fonts can have a huge negative impact on students’ learning.
3. Get them hands on!
Code is like language, which means students won’t fully learn it until they do it. Get students hands on as quickly as possible! Turn the code you’re showing them into a shared learning object that they can discuss and explain to each other.
4. Pick Examples with Narrative Arc
If you expect students to engage with it, your example should have some sort of narrative arc to it. For instance this code has little narrative arc:
But this code, demonstrating the same concept of opacity, has a mystery about it that motivates an authentic inquiry into how the code is doing what it does:
Code that is mysterious or even broken in some way lays the foundation for the most fruitful exploration by students.
Showing Students Code with Trinket
At trinket our mission is to make it dead simple to teach with code, so we’ve listened closely to teachers describing the principles above. To teach with trinket, follow these steps:
Put the code you want to show into a HTML or Python trinket. Or, choose to start with any of the trinkets above.
Click the Share button to get a link to send your students
Once your students visit the link they’ll see exactly what you see
It’s that easy! We’ve also built great tools for presenting such as Fullscreen mode and font size adjustments into every trinket. Find these controls
Fullscreen mode and font size adjustments help you clearly show your students the example you’re talking about.
Paul Kostak is a middle school science teacher at Canterbury School in Greensboro, North Carolina who began his career in environmental and geophysical consulting. He’s doing an amazing job of teaching a range of ages and subjects with code, and I’m very excited he agreed to share some of his thoughts with us. We recently got to visit his classroom and see his innovative style first person. Enjoy!
This is part of a series of periodic interviews we do with educational innovators. You can find the others here.
Elliott: What is your teaching style? What’s a typical class session look like for you? Paul: I want my classroom student centered as much as possible with the students in charge of their own learning. My role is to be a facilitator, giving them the resources they need and guiding them down a road to be as successful as they can, while also preparing them for the challenges in the science courses that lie ahead.
