Coding for Educators Reflection

As excited as I am to wrap up one more course, Coding for Educators, towards finishing my degree, I am equally excited to start Coding II next semester. I always wanted to explore coding once I saw how much of a push they were making for it in be incorporated in schools, but I never took the time to follow through and actually learn it. This course forced my hand at trying it out, and now I can't wait to implement coding into my classroom.

One of the most important things that I learned in this course was that there are many ways I could incorporate computer science into my 8th Grade Math classroom. Working at a STEM school, I am encouraged to help my students make these connections between what they are doing in Robotics class to my math curriculum. I've been looking for quality STEM lessons to do with my students, but I didn't really like the ones I tried because I felt like they weren't tied closely enough to the math I wanted them to be practicing. After learning a little bit about Scratch and Python, seeing how it works and coding my own projects, I immediately came up with a few ways to incorporate them into my units I'm currently teaching. I'd imagine that this is true for many math units, so rather than searching all over looking for the perfect lesson that I'm never satisfied with, I will spend that time trying to learn a new programming tool that I could then make my own lesson with. 

As I mentioned above, two of the programming tools that I figured out ways to use in my 8th Grade Math classroom are Scratch and Python. For Scratch, I plan on using it when I teach geometric transformations, having students create a story where their Sprite moves around using translations, rotations, reflections, and dilations. I already actually used the Scratch lesson that I came up with for this course, where the students had to create a scene where three different Sprites were intersecting each other at certain points in plane. They had to make each Sprite move to various points on a line, and they used Desmos to graph a system of linear equations to prove that their characters were indeed moving on a straight line. I did this the last day before Thanksgiving break, so there were low stakes, but the students seemed to really enjoy it even if all of them didn't successfully take away the math I was hoping for. 

I also am excited to have the students create their own version of the "rock, paper, scissors" Python project to teach probability and data displays. I plan to have students record how much of each option is selected by the computer, then compare the theoretical probability to the experimental probability. They will show the results using one of the data displays we are learning about.

Coding is a skill that will open many doors for our students, and my goal as an educator is to help create as many opportunities for my students as possible. When I think about my middle school students, very few of them have any ideas what they want to do for a career, so it'd be great to show them that coding is enjoyable and accessible to anyone that puts their mind to it. I wish that I had a little encouragement and motivation to explore programming growing up to know that it was an option!