WHY CODING? This video is a great start to our month of STEM work and coding exercises.
Please sit with your student and watch this short ten minute video before beginning on the lesson.
The Curriculum calls for 20 minutes of coding practice a day.
Obviously, if you have coded before or played a coding game....20 minutes will fly by. That is ok....you have lots of other work to do. Again, the goal here is to work every day especially if it's for a short time. Other ideas would be to limit other lessons if you plan to work for longer on others. The only wrong answer is to not work on it at all. If you work for longer you could do every other day. Please do what best works for you and your schedule. This work is intended to be fun but very worthwhile and valuable at the same time.
After the video, please fire up a quick ten minute session of blockly games. https://blockly.games/?lang=en
Blockly games is a great start into the blockly style of programming which is used in hundreds of applications. It's a very un-intimidating way to begin to learn standard programming concepts without having to know all of the text and syntax. This game is web-based and will be great to come back to time and time again when you need to work for a few minutes. It records your progress and gets more difficult as you advance.
Moving on from Blockly Games you cannot go wrong with Code.org This has courses for ALL ages of learners and can keep you busy learning for a very long time.
This is enough to get us all started in our month of STEM. Good Luck!!