Conclusion

Coding and computational thinking are essential digital age learning skills that should have been implemented almost twenty years ago. Our educational system is moving at a snail’s pace, and we need to get more educators on board with the use of technology to change thinking.

Advances in neuroscience have had a great impact on how scientists and educators view learning. Rather than being the sage on the stage and imparting our knowledge onto students, we must turn our role into the meddler in the middle. Learning alongside our students and empowering their abilities to think computationally will build our global community into a more productive and self-sustaining world.

By reading this book and putting the aptitudes and skills into practice, educators will help K–5 students move from the concrete to the representational to the abstract in their understanding of how computers can help humans become more efficient in their ability to process and make sense of information. From the Bee-Bot to Code.org resources to the open-ended projects created in Scratch, student creativity and content knowledge can be infused with coding skills.

The final concluding statements of this book come from two students with very different vantage points: a middle school student who began using Scratch in third grade and has been passionate about spreading the word to others, and a student in a teacher education program who sees the benefits that coding and computational thinking have for educators.

Student Perspective: Bailey Williams

In the setting of a daily classroom, many lessons are taught and progressively learned throughout the day, whether it comes from history, math, science, or any other subject of the sort. The basics of teaching these lessons are mostly textbooks being read and information being recited, but many don’t know that more can be absorbed from hands-on experience, such as computer programming and Scratch.

During my third grade year of elementary school, my class did individual projects based on their own selection of a non-American island and its culture. Instead of going the normal route and doing a physical presentation of my island, Sri Lanka, I decided to make a Scratch project that functioned like a presentation instead. My fellow students and teachers were impressed by the demonstration, and some tried Scratch themselves. The following year another opportunity presented itself to engage my peers in Scratch yet again, this time to help them in a review of electromagnetism for the unit test. The Scratch game I created was a highly interactive simulation that allowed the students to input their name, answer questions, and physically connect components of a battery that would help them in preparation for the test. When the results of my classes’ overall grade on the test came through, almost more than three quarters of them had gotten at least an A-.

In my experience the availability of Scratch and other early programming sites is crucial to the new era of students, mainly because of the multiple benefits that will come of it in the future of new technology, as well as the benefits that it will present in the current setting in the classroom.

Future Educator Perspective: Ashley Kitzerow

As a current student and future educator, I have had limited experience with coding in the classroom. I was introduced to Scratch my freshman year of high school, and that was my first experience with coding. Unfortunately, my grade school district did not have any coding incorporated into their curriculum. However, after I was introduced to Scratch, I found myself looking for ways I could incorporate it into my educational career so that my peers and teachers could see the benefits of using coding in the classroom. The classes in which I found these opportunities were the ones in which the teacher had a project-based curriculum.

The first opportunity I had to use Scratch as a student was not until my sophomore year of high school during my German class. We had to create a project that showed we understood the terminology and etiquette used in restaurants in Germany. I used Scratch to create a short video simulating somebody ordering food at a restaurant, to show I had mastered the skills and vocabulary from the unit. Many of my peers simply worked in groups and acted out ordering food at a restaurant. While they still were able to show their skill mastery through skits, I benefited from being allowed to use Scratch because I prefer to work alone on projects rather than in groups. There are many other students who would benefit from Scratch simply because it allows them to show mastery of skills that would otherwise require a group effort. While I was in high school, this was the main benefit I saw from coding. However, once I got to college and began to look at coding from an educator’s perspective, I began to notice more benefits that I hadn’t noticed before.

Since starting college, I have only had one opportunity to use coding, and unfortunately, it wasn’t a part of any curriculum. For one of my English courses, I completed an H-Options project (an additional project designed by the student so they can receive honors credit for a course that is not honors) and was able to use Scratch as part of the project. After reading an Iroquois creation story (a story explaining how the Iroquois believe the world was created), I recreated the story using Scratch and then designed a lesson plan. In this lesson, I had the students each use Scratch to recreate the story, with the lesson objective being the understanding that the replication of the exact same message cannot be sent using multiple mediums, meaning that it is impossible to exactly recreate the Iroquois creation story they read using Scratch because there are some textual ideas that cannot be represented with moving pictures.

Technology is an integral part of today’s society, but it is often left untaught in schools because the teachers know less about technology than the students do. Through this project, I developed the belief that this common myth is untrue. There is much about technology that children do not know, and if our educators are willing to take the time to educate themselves on topics such as coding, they can open a whole new world through which students can learn. By using coding, an educator can not only spark students’ future interest to go into technological fields of work, but it also allows teachers to reach students they may have been unable to reach before. Coding is a very logical process, and for those who are logical thinkers, using Scratch may allow them to comprehend a topic that was confusing to them before.

Something else I learned through this project was that students using coding forces them to develop a deep understanding of the concept they are learning about. By using coding programs such as Scratch, the student must slow down their thinking and break the concept down into smaller chunks. For example, when I was recreating the Iroquois creation story, I had to go over the story sentence by sentence and ask myself, “Can this be shown using pictures?” Through this process, I developed a much more thorough understanding of the story than I had before. As educators, one goal to keep in mind is to have the students develop a deep, not surface, understanding of the curriculum. Using coding is one way this can be done. By having students develop a deep understanding of the curriculum, the teacher is also setting them up to be successful critical thinkers, which is a useful tool to have as a student and citizen.