Coding Fun and Frustration

This year I wanted to take on coding as one of the tool and a lenses that I used to address the issue of Mathematical reasoning and language that my learners were facing. In term one I looked at coding 'theory' with my kids. I did this through using the CS unplugged tasks and adapting them for Explain Everything on students iPads.

This term we have begun using scratch and first thing I noticed was the problem solving. Student in my class knew what they wanted to happen but they found that when they pressed run what they had coded was not what they expected. This lead to a lot of great questions and talk in my classroom as learner drew on the skills of others or tackled the problem on their own.

Well there was a lot of talk reflecting back I am skill concerned about the quality of the talk. I think for my next lesson on coding I want to draw on some of the ideas Dr Jannie van Hees shared with us and scaffold specific vocabulary which we will continue to build in our cries for help and frustration as we solve our coding challenges.