My flappy birds project
My final challenge completed in Flappy Birds

Coding is essentially plugging instructions into a system that tell that system what actions to perform and how to carry them out. The quality of the instructions determines how the task is performed and the quality it is performed with. This idea of following exact instructions was wonderfully expressed in the short video we watched during class about following exact instructions to make a peanut butter and jam sandwich. The children in this video are learning the value of clear, sequential instructions as their father makes sandwiches following their exact instructions with hilarious results — I feel for the little boy.

Though the focus of the lesson was on coding and computational thinking, which we often associate with mathematics, it made me think about how important making sure your expectations and instructions are crystal clear for your students. Sometimes leaving room for interpretation is important for fostering creativity, but in other situations, too much vagueness can lead to unfavourable results. Like the father in the video tormenting his children by following their instructions for making a pb&j sandwich exactly as they had written, I will use this activity as a segue into computational thinking and later into coding. Though I’ve never used it in class before, I can see it being very successful and wonderfully cross-curricular in nature.

During my hands-on time during class, I had a look at some of the coding programs available on code.org and tried one called flappy birds — there is a screenshot of my final challenge at the top of this reflection. I loved how interactive the program/game was and how it scaffolded computational thinking so well. Though I have never coded in my life, I understand the process a little better and if I kept working with these educational games, I’m sure I could get quite good at it. There was one program/game where you could choose to work with the computational language or code. How wonderful is this? For those of our students who are super keen, there are wonderfully scaffolded interactive programs, with varying difficulty levels, where they can hone their skills.

I look forward to incorporating some of the material I picked up in this class and putting together a few lessons and units I hope will be as informative as they are fun.