This week’s lesson on coding was very interesting as it is something I had never heard of before and was intrigued to learn more about it. Having never heard of it before, I was surprised to learn that for children today, having the ability to code is a very important part of literacy in today’s society, so much so that studies are suggesting that coding is the new literacy. For children, when they learn to code, the learn to problem solve, design projects and communicate ideas (John Naughton 2012).

In today’s lesson, we explored coding using ‘Scratch Jr’ which is an introductory coding programme that helps infants from aged five and onwards to create their very own interactive games and stories. For young children to create their own Scratch projects, it benefits them because they think creatively and work collaboratively which is emphasised in today’s world for success (The Lead Project, 2014). Having never used Scratch before, much less heard of it, after today’s lesson it is clear that it was developed for young children to develop creative thinking skills as well as develop their logical reasoning, problem solving and collaboration skills (The Lead Project 2014).

Our learning objective for today’s lesson was to create an interactive story to promote literacy skills using a coding programme, and as always link to the Curriculum for Excellence experiences and outcomes. The assessment task consisted of creating our very own Scratch adventure story using the iPads provided for us. The app allowed us to explore different interactive activities that encouraged us to use our imagination, creativity, knowledge, problem solving and collaboration skills. The task included changing the background for each story we created, adding characters to make the story more interesting. To make the viewer even more engrossed, we used our skills and programmed the characters to move and added speech to each of their characters.

Today’s session definitely opened my eyes to the many interactive programmes that we as adults are unaware of. Scratch is another programme that I have been able to add to my list that I will take away from my experience in university and teach the many young children I will work with about. I particularly love how Scratch gives you the freedom to use your imagination and helps develop communication and problem-solving skills to create a story that although looks simple but has been created with great thought and creativity.

References

John Naughton. (2012). Why all our kids should be taught how to code.Available: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/mar/31/why-kid. Last accessed 15th Feb 2018.

The Lead Project (2014) Super Scratch Programming Adventure: Learn to Program by Making Cool Games! No Starch Press.