#coding to learn

"Starting with Scratch" (scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tip_bar=getStarted), our first foray into the Scratch visual block programming language today. Thanks to the Smart Board, it was everything I'd hoped it would be.

I'm teaching summer school with 75 special needs students, facing a variety of challenges. A number are on the autism spectrum. They are arranged in a rotation of 5 classes of about 15 students, and the course is running just short of 4 weeks, but there are only about 14 teaching days, what with dances, movies and "The Play". Only two students, both from my regular day program, have any previous experience with coding, and that was brief. My own experience with coding is very minimal. I'm not in any way a programmer! We started with 3 days of "unplugged" exercises, colouring pixel art, mostly to keep from freaking out the adults helping with the kids. Last week we went through the 20 mini-tutorials of the Hour of Code - Maze Activity. Today though, was coding in earnest, even though we were only copying out a program. We were using the full Scratch 2.0 language and not just a subset of commands. My goal in choosing computer programming as a course focus, was not so much to have the students learn coding, as it was to use coding to learn. Our primary objective today was engagement. I wanted to start a conversation with the kids around the Smart Board, about the activity and have them join in with each doing a step in building part of the program. They would then do the whole activity themselves and hopefully collaborate.

The Smart Board turned out to be an amazing vehicle for fostering interaction and collaboration. During the teacher lead explanation of the activity, pretty well every student in the class joined in to complete the animation of the dancing Scratch cat. A number of students were able to overcome physical challenges by using a pointer as a stylus.

I was especially pleased when the students broke to work on the assignment. Besides working on individual computers, some of the students worked as a group using the Smart Board. In a couple of the classes, students who had been difficult to motivate to work, offered to lead the activity with more challenged students. It was amazing and really gratifying to see these students lead their peers through the exercise.

The Hour of Code Maze Activity is turning out to be a great vehicle to teach special needs students concepts like: counting, distinguishing left from right, and as a way to put simple instructions into a sequence. I've been teaching 60-70 special needs students at the TCDSB summer school at James Cardinal McGuigan C.S.S. We started last Wednesday with an "unplugged" activity, translating matrices of numbers on graph paper into pixel art. On Monday we moved on to "Hour of Code" activities at learn.code.org, specifically Stage 2: The Maze. The Maze uses a web based, visual, block coding language, called Blockly, to guide a character through a maze. The characters are taken from the popular Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies games. The language uses representational coding blocks you drag and drop to provide instructions to move the characters. In concept, it reminds me a lot of visual communication systems that use symbol pictures to allow our non-verbal students to communicate. Blockly is from the same family of computer languages as MIT's Scratch (scratch.mit.edu).

The students I'm teaching face a wide variety of behavioural, physical and cognitive challenges, and yet virtually every one of them has been able to participate in these tutorials, albeit some need guidance and assistance to do so. On the other hand, some are beating the pants off of the adults involved, in the speed at which they are learning this activity. Through guided questioning, this young lady in the wheelchair pictured below, has been able to guide her Educational Assistants through the exercises. She found some of the difficulties the adults were having a little amusing.

The concepts the kids are learning include counting and distinguishing left from right. They are also required to figure out the order in which the instructions the characters follow, must be placed. You can guide the students through this by adding one instruction at a time and then running the code (instructions). Figure out the next step and then add that instructional block and run them again, building the instructional stack one step at a time. Have the kids deliberately make errors. It relieves tension, because it's funny, and it helps them learn. Have the kids collaborate and copy. This is also an activity that can be done as a group using a Smart Board. Have them discuss and plan out the moves. Divide up the jobs such as placing the coding blocks and pressing "run".