As mentioned before, I'm at the beginning stages of learning more about 'making'...the whole maker movement is something I never knew about, but sits very well with what I believe about learning. Part of this learning has been around coding.
Prior to this month if you had mentioned coding, the visual image it drummed up was one of a slightly darkened room, banks of screens, pasty individuals looking at those screens and seeing 'matrix' like stuff on them. How wrong was I (once again)? People had mentioned in the news, at conferences etc about learning robotics, computer programming...but all this just washed right over me. I still don't really understand it all...hence this post.
In order to learn, I signed up to code.org, and completed the hour of code tutorial. I had angry birds chasing pigs, zombies eating sunflowers...if/else blocks, repeat blocks...Mark (FaceBook) and Bill (Microsoft) telling me what to do...such great learning. And that is what surprised me...I didn't learn to 'code' as such, but the problem-solving, logical thinking, and conversations (my wife helped towards the end) were so great. The LEARNING embedded into the act of learning to code, excellent. I'm excited about trying this with some of my learners, setting them up to work together.
I realise it was quite an easy set of activities I completed, but the satisfaction of learning was still the same (and I got a sweet certificate at the end...).
Somehow doing this led me to @AKeenReader 's blog...will blog about this later.
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