Today I attended a Code Club Australia teacher training
session on Scratch facilitated by Ian Wedlock. It was a great day aimed at teacher and librarians starting
their journey with Scratch.
Many thanks to @cityofsydney #libraries for hosting our @CodeClubAus #teachertraining day at #customshousesydney pic.twitter.com/da0fgGiDrp— Alessia Pagano (@AlessiaPagano) July 5, 2016
Coding is something I have always been interested in, but
never really pursued. As a high
schooler, I dabbled with a bit of HTML. When I was completing my TAFE
certificate in Networking, we needed to copy lines and lines and lines and
lines and lines of code. Waste of time really.
Coding has been recognised as something important to teach
in schools. It isn’t explicitly stated in any curriculum. Teachers can use coding as a tool to achieve outcomes, especially in "Producing and Implementing".
Coding isn’t the point.
Computational thinking and problem solving is the point.
In a society that focuses on how well a school does in
NAPLAN tests, I wonder how schools are seriously preparing our students for the
future. “C” isn’t always going to be the correct answer. Are we developing a
society of humans that have all the answers handed to them on a silver platter?
Or if the answer isn’t black, it’s white? It is great to score 100% on a test,
but what are you DOING with that knowledge. How are you manipulating it? How
are you applying it to new situations? If I give you the same question
disguised in a different way, are you able to work out what the answer will be?
Probably not.
Coding is not about random symbols that mean something to a
select group of geeks. Coding is about creating a series of steps that will
perform a given action. And you will not succeed the first time. You may not
success a second time. You may need to fail several times before you actually
succeed.
Are we teaching kids that failure is OK? I ban rubbers from
my classrooms because I want my students to see their errors and learn from
them. Why does work need to be perfect? Why must be erase our mistakes as if
they never happened. Sometimes, when I enter pro-rubber classrooms (insert
cringe here), kids just rub out and make the same mistake again, which they rub
out, and make the same mistake again. What was the point of rubbing out? We
need to teach kids to identify WHY their mistake is a mistake so that they can
self-correct their errors.
Failure is OK. Failure is a First Attempt In Learning. As
Jennie Magiera said, you need to FAIL to SAIL (Second Attempt In Learning).
I love this video about Audri. I love this video, not only
because this child’s parents are amazing enough to allow their son to build a
Rube Goldberg machine in their house, but because this child recognises that
failure happens. Failure is a part of the learning process. How many times to we
communicate THAT to our students.
Back to the rubbers. I usually have at least one child in
tears a day by the end of the first term because I wouldn’t let them rub out. I
have even had the tantrum kids who scrunched up their papers or ripped out their
pages just to prove a point that they should start again.
I give them back their crumpled papers. I make them sticky
tape the torn out page back in.
Why?
Throwing a tantrum when you fail is NOT ok. These children
have obviously never experienced failure.
And that makes me sad. It also makes me angry. When my 13m
old son falls down, I say, “Up you get!” These tantrum-throwing children have
never had someone say, “Get up. Try again. What did you do wrong? How can we
fix this?”
And then there is the flip side. The “I can’t do it” kids.
“Have you tried?” I ask. “But I can’t do it!” They cry. Again, I ask, “Have you
tried?” And I am stuck in the infinite loop of learned helplessness. These kids
WILL NOT TRY! They are too scared of making a mistake. They have not been
schooled in the art of taking risks. They are too scared of failure.
Seriously, what sort of generation are we developing?
Coding is the key. Coding allows students with a safe
platform to fail and to solve their own problems. This computational thinking
forces students to look at problems in multiple ways. It teaches students about
giving clear, concise directions that achieve a goal.
Now I challenge you, the teacher. Let’s go back to the
infinite loop of learned helplessness. The “I can’t do it” teachers. “Have you
tried?” I ask. “But I can’t do it!” They cry. Again, I ask, “Have you tried?”
Yes, I have dabbled in coding before. But I when I ran my
first coding class, I played the TED talk from Mitch Resnik, printed the cards and
said ‘go for it’. I didn’t sit there discovering the in’s and out’s of Scratch.
Some kids were happy to just follow the cards and take their time. Other kids
explored Scratch in their own time and made some AMAZING games and
presentations. One child used Scratch to present his Antarctica project for his
teacher!
I also discovered studio.code.org this year. They have 20-hour
beginner courses for kids. Interestingly, some children in my group who have the
‘gifted’ label (I call it a label because they have never formally been tested)
found the Code Studio course difficult. They constantly could not find the
right answer. With this group of students, it took a while to get them
confident enough to have a go – that fear of getting it wrong was getting in
the way of them just having fun with it.
My future goal? I want to convince more students to come to
my ICT club at lunch time and dabble with coding. I’d love to invest in some
Makey Makeys so that I can build the foundations of a Makerspace in my school.
And if Stage 3 is not interested, there is always Scratch Jr on the iPad or the
Infants Code Studio courses.
