A few years ago, we overhauled our technology schedule for 4th and 5th grade and moved to what is now known as the 4Cs program. I've been in charge of the 'Coding' block since this beginning, and I made some significant changes this year.

As I began lesson planning over Christmas break, I made a list of what I liked about Swift Playgrounds (our current curriculum) and what I didn’t like about it. As I began to think through it, I realized that what I didn’t like about Learn to Code 1 in Swift Playgrounds was how quickly the difficulty went up for our students.  By class five, students who didn’t naturally “get” the concepts of coding became frustrated. As I went to search for some different curriculum, I ended up on Code.org for coding curriculum due to its ability to create classes and monitor progress through our Clever portal integration. For those of you who don't know what Clever is, it's a way for students to use a QR code to log in to a portal. This provides them with access to multiple applications and services we use.

We're just wrapping up our quarter of coding, and I am thrilled with the results. Code.org allowed me to create new classes on the fly as students finished up with with our planned work. We even had an "Hour of Code" day where they went through multiple coding projects in a single day. I've heard great feedback from the 5th graders on how much they liked Code.org compared to what we used last year. As their teacher, I feel like we learned a lot more this year than in previous years and had more fun during the process. The previously difficult ramp-up was much more manageable, and I never felt like a student came to a problem they couldn't solve. One of the things a lot of students struggle with in 2020 is the ability to work through difficult problems without wanting to “Google” it. Even in an age of instant information, problem solving skills are still extremely valuable.

Reflecting on the quarter of coding, I was reminded of one of the things that I love about Brainerd Baptist School. We're never content with doing just what we did last year. We're always looking to improve the learning journey for our students. Even though our previous coding curriculum was working fine, the curriculum change provided students an opportunity to learn more in our short time together. I am extremely happy with the results, and I hope your students are able to benefit from this unique learning experience! 

We have a guest writer for the second consecutive blog post. You may remember that earlier this summer, I announced a new innovative approach to teaching some new subjects at BBS entitled “The 4 C’s”. The first "C" is coding. BBS students had their first coding class with Mr. Chambers yesterday. I have asked him to briefly talk about how our students are learning this critical new skill at Brainerd Baptist School. Although Taylor Swift has been all over the news this last week, our "swift" is different than what you might be thinking! 

We just kicked off our first coding class this week and the students were really excited. The programming language we are exposing the students to is Swift. This is the new language for Mac, iOS, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.

The curriculum we are using is Swift Playgrounds that was developed by Apple for the express purposes of schools helping to expose students to entry level coding.

In our first class, we looked at the differences between "commands and functions", and then worked through exercises on implementing them into code form. To finish up, the students were given a block of code, and they had to “fix it”. We discussed the difficulty in troubleshooting your own code vs someone else’s code.

Next we will be looking at the coding terms of "functions and loops".

I am excited that we are offering this class to our students. I've already received a number of emails inquiring about the student continuing to develop coding skills at home as well. I will be providing some additional resources for those students that want to continue learning coding more in-depth at the end of the quarter. If you have questions, or would like to learn more, please feel free to contact me.