When conversations about coding come up I always think about my brother. Him downstairs in the corner of our basement taking apart an old pc laptop my mom brought home, just to see if he could put it back together. Then my memory moves forward in time to sitting beside him in a co-op work space in Paris, France as grew increasingly more frustrated trying to change the coding on a website he was working on. All the while my brain struggling to wrap its self around the binary code scrawling across my brother’s screen.
The relationship between coding and education was something I only became aware of in post-secondary education –or through vague pop-culture references like the Matrix. My ideas were engulfed by the notion that coding was like another language, that it wasn’t for the faint of hearts, that it took an enormous amount of time and skill to master. And so the concept of integrating coding into the classroom seemed extremely intense to me. Our introduction to Rich McCue and CodeBC painted quite a different picture. Coding, just like many other tech tools with looked at so far this term, provides a rich and diverse learning space for students of at all stages. By supporting the development of computational thinking, with the added benefit of being extremely student centred, coding brings math alive. Especially as it can easily be tailored to the interest of the specific student who then maintains autonomy over their own learning journeys.
McCue also showed us a wonderful YouTube video about direct and exact instructions, something that is crucial for coding, and I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. Not only does it connect to coding, but also highlights how we communicate and the amount of assumptions we can make with regards what we may deem as ‘obvious’. The video is called “THIS “EXACT INSTRUCTIONS CHALLENGE” IS SO HILARIOUS“.
While I tinkered around on some of the coding resources provided throughout Rich McCue, I definitely had the feeling of stepping into the unknown. Rather than step back from it, I took it slow and found myself quickly mesmerized. Even though I’m far from being proficient in the coding universe, I’m excited to find ways to include this new (to me) technological tool in my classrooms.
