Why Students Should Code and Easy Ways to Get Started

Code.org is a nonprofit dedicated to expanding computer science education. With strong donors like Microsoft and Google backing it, Code.org is able to to partner with school districts to offer resources like courses and workshops at no cost. Code.org is also behind the annual Hour of Code, where tens of millions of students take part in a one-hour introductory coding course.

Other popular tools for teaching code include Scratch, a free platform by MIT that offers an easy drag and drop interface geared towards beginners. There’s also Codeacademy and Pencil Code. Another resource is CodeCombat, a multiplayer game that teaches javascript in a fun computer game-like environment. There are a number of apps out there as well, mostly geared towards the elementary and middle school crowd including Daisy the Dinosaur, Scratch Jr., Hopscotch and Cargo-bot. This is not an exhaustive list of coding resources, but one that should certainly give you a place to start.

How to Add Coding to Curriculum

There seems to be two schools of thought when it comes to implementing coding into your curriculum. The first is to make coding part of a computer science class. In this scenario, a school might hire a teacher and create a dedicated class or purchase curriculum from a company like CodeHS. The other method is to embed coding concepts in a cross curricular way. The Beaver Country Day School in Massachusetts took this approach.

“It’s important we don’t look at coding as a thing. I think that’s a mistake people make, thinking it’s a thing out there all on its own. It’s a problem solving tool, not a thing,” says Peter Hutton, head of Beaver Country Day School.

There’s no dedicated “coding time” at Beaver Country, instead, students are encouraged to view coding as a tool to solve problems and demonstrate knowledge.

“We try to make sure we’re doing a lot of differentiated instruction. We are giving kids opportunities to show what they know in different ways so it’s not just papers and quizzes. Kids can have debates, they can make a video. Kids can do a million things to show their knowledge in authentic ways,” says Rob MacDonald, Math and English teacher at Beaver Country Day School.

Coding is just one of those ways students have the opportunity to demonstrate what they’ve learned. For example, in an English class, students reading MacBeth used code to create basic artificial intelligence to allow for a scenario where they could have a conversation with a character. Rather than take a quiz where they matched quotes to the appropriate character’s name, students were able to type questions and have the character respond, allowing them to get a feel for which character they were talking to.

“It still gets at that same idea of understanding the characters and getting at their motivation, but in a much more engaging way,” MacDonald says.

Educators do not have to have a computer science background to implement any of the tools mentioned in this article. The goal isn’t to produce students that are coding geniuses, but instead to introduce them to a tool that may be helpful in navigating our increasingly digital world.

‘We want to be able to empower students through coding, ” says Keeshin. Not that every student is going to be a programmer, that’s not what the opportunity to learn coding is about. It’s saying these are skills that unlock a lot of opportunities because the future is moving that way.”