Learning & Leading Through Technology

Coding in the Elementary School Classroom

My goal as an educator is to lead my students to new ways of thinking, understanding, and communicating in a digital world.

I know that if I teach my students
basic coding, they will be on their
way to learning those skills and have
a good time doing it. But I didn’t
expect this breathless comment to
spill out of the mouth of one of my
third graders after I taught her to use
Scratch. “I just started coding, and it
is like a new world!” she said. “It is
amazing because you get to almost go
into someone else’s brain and teach
them based on how they think.”
When I heard those words, I real-
ized my students were learning much
more than just HTML. Since start-
ing my journey with the Coding is
Common to the Core initiative in the
Paradise Valley Unified School District
in Phoenix, Arizona, I have looked
for innovative ways to implement the
ISTE Standards for Students (formerly
the NETS•S) and the Common Core
State Standards (CCSS) while teaching
my students to code.

I started the year with Scratch, giving my students design-based challenges to familiarize them with the basic blocks. For example, after a lesson on idioms, I had the students create an animation in Scratch to illustrate an idiom. They unleashed their imagination while demonstrating understanding and mastery of a concept.

Next, they would reflect on and
analyze the thinking they used while
programming. Here’s how one of my
fourth graders described his experi-
ence using Scratch:
I am working on an idiom project
—a taste of your own medicine.

It was pretty challenging because most of the sprites they had were not what I needed so I had to create my own and my own background and fix things up and reprogram it to make it better. I had to make my mad scientist disappear. When I was trying to do that I tried to make my own block and typed in “disappear,” but when I clicked on that for him, he just stayed there. Then I had to make him move 240 steps so you didn’t see him anymore, but you could still see his hand. I’m trying to make him “disappear,” but it’s hard because I tried to get the background to go over him, but that didn’t work either (so)… I’m looking around Scratch to see how I can program it to set itself up all over again.

Real-World Debugging Experience

Next, I gave my students a series of
debugging challenges, beginning
with some created by MIT’s Scratch
Ed team. This gave them exposure to
the process of solving glitches, and it
simulated the experiences of comput-
er scientists working in the real world.

Being put in a situation where they were “stuck” spontaneously led my students to a paired-programming approach that involved communication and collaboration with their peers.

Instead of struggling independently on complex tasks, they asked one another for ideas and leads to solve the challenges.

For a performance-based assessment, I started a studio in Scratch called Mak’s Debuggers (although one student recently suggested I change it to Mak’s Exterminators), where my students created and submitted their own debug-it programs for their classmates.

Scratch also allows students to tinker with existing projects. Using the remix feature, they can redesign another student’s project, adding their own touches and personality while learning from others in an informal but authentic way.

As the students worked on their Scratch projects, I also taught some basic computer science concepts, such as binary numbers, so that students would better understand how computers work and refine their computational thinking. Beginning with a mini-lesson on binary numbers, I asked them to connect what they learned to the eight standards for mathematical practice in the CCSS.