Blog Archives

Coding is the new literacy – games can help

Ira Flatow of Science Friday (one of the best shows on National Public Radio), Interviewed Hadi Partovi of Code.org on the importance of teaching young people to code.  Code.org encouraged the development of CodeCombat – a game that teaches players to program in Java Script.  Learning to code helps students to develop Higher Order Thinking Skills and other crucial  21st Century Skills.

From Science Friday (NPR);

“With smartphones, tablets, and apps, coding is becoming the language of the digital age, but is the U.S. lagging behind? A panel of experts discusses how we can improve our coding literacy and close the programming gap among women and minorities.”

Produced by Alexa Lim, Associate Producer
Produced by Annie Minoff, SciArts Producer
Guests
  • Hadi Partovi
    CEO and Co-founder, Code.org
    Seattle, Washington
  • Jane Margolis
    Senior Researcher
    Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
    University of California, Los Angeles
    Los Angeles, California
  • Vanessa Hurst
    Founder, CodeMontage
    Co-founder, Girl Develop It
    New York, New York
Related Links

Code.org

To listen to the program on Science Friday click here;

http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/01/24/2014/is-coding-the-language-of-the-digital-age.html

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Millions of students learn to program in Java while playing a game

Kids playing Hour of Code

“In one week last week, Code.org’s Hour of Code reached more than 15 million students in 170 countries. Every major tech company promoted it, celebrities talked about it, and even the US President helped get the word out in their kickoff video. And shooting past Code.org’s crazy target of ten million players, kids are still continuing to play this week, with 600 million lines of code written and one in five US schoolchildren participating (with six times as many girls playing last week than have ever taken a computer science class in the US). It spread to more students in seven days than the first seven months of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram combined.

As one of Code.org’s partners, we at CodeCombat were both excited and hilariously unprepared to help teach such a sizable swarm of students to defeat the 44 ogres in our beginner campaign. Read on for what we learned from the onslaught of child programmers, including how obsessed kids are with games, how American students are the best trolls and the worst programmers, just how badly a user experience test can go, and the unfortunate difference between reddit traffic and school traffic.”

To read the full article click here;

http://sett.com/codecombat/180000-child-programmers-versus-44-ogres

Students Learn Coding Through Digital-Game Creation

Michelle R. Davis writes;

“South Hills High School teacher Saleta Thomas bills her class as a digital game-design program for students. But once students opt to take the class, they start learning computer coding through basic programs like Alice, then move on to Flash, JavaScript, ActionScript, and other coding languages.

Since the students in the Fort Worth, Texas, school are focused on digital-game creation, often they don’t even realize they’re learning computer coding, Thomas says. The “marketing” ploy of labeling the course digital-game design has had an impact, she says. Computer science wasn’t a popular course at the low-income school, which has struggled over the past few years to bring test scores up, but the digital-gaming elective has gone from 22 students its first year to 45 this school year, and 81 are projected for the next school year.

“If we get the hook into them through gaming, then when they go to college they can see there’s a whole lot more offered in computer science,” Thomas says. “If you major in computer science, your world is really open.”

To read more about coding, Code.org, Codecademy, MIT Media Lab, Scratch, CoderDojo, and Kodu 

click here;

http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2013/06/12/03game-coding.h06.html