You may have heard about the "Hour of Code" recently in the news. It's a weeklong push to get young people interested in computer science. This year it occurred during the week of December 8. Hadi Partovi's non-profit Code.org has done a fantastic job aligning celebrities, athletes, politicians, and successful business people to promote coding as an essential 21st century skill for all ages. Even President Obama sat down to write code, and he recorded a PSA to recruit young people to become coders and inventors. At Dawson, I think we should call it "Year of Code"! Students are learning to code throughout the year, and really enjoying it.
Lower School students have been learning programming based on code.org's curriculum for the last two months during our weekly class session. Students are transitioning to learning ScratchJr on the iPad in K-2, and Scratch on our iMacs in 3rd and 4th. Young students are totally capable of coding, and it's really rewarding to see them learning so quickly. Based on their progress, I think we can move the primary grades on to Scratch programming this spring.
Thanks to Sarah Amirani, Dawson’s Director of Marketing and Communications, we were able to get some great press about our coding program in the Longmont Times Call and the Boulder Daily Camera. It was great to see our students featured for their efforts at school! If you didn’t see the article, you can still read it online.
If you're interested in programming, Scratch is a free visual coding tool created by a team at MIT. On the surface it seems light, fun and easy. However, buried in all of its cute graphics are lessons about core principles in computer science - logic, control structures, events, and many other object-oriented coding concepts. It's a fantastic gateway to learning traditional object-oriented programming languages. I encourage you to try it out with your son or daughter at home.
Lower School students have been learning programming based on code.org's curriculum for the last two months during our weekly class session. Students are transitioning to learning ScratchJr on the iPad in K-2, and Scratch on our iMacs in 3rd and 4th. Young students are totally capable of coding, and it's really rewarding to see them learning so quickly. Based on their progress, I think we can move the primary grades on to Scratch programming this spring.
Thanks to Sarah Amirani, Dawson’s Director of Marketing and Communications, we were able to get some great press about our coding program in the Longmont Times Call and the Boulder Daily Camera. It was great to see our students featured for their efforts at school! If you didn’t see the article, you can still read it online.
If you're interested in programming, Scratch is a free visual coding tool created by a team at MIT. On the surface it seems light, fun and easy. However, buried in all of its cute graphics are lessons about core principles in computer science - logic, control structures, events, and many other object-oriented coding concepts. It's a fantastic gateway to learning traditional object-oriented programming languages. I encourage you to try it out with your son or daughter at home.