26C.6563.23, PE Central, Teaching Coding with Confidence

Target Audience: Activities are designed for a variety of grade levels, but are best suited for the Pk-8 environment including classroom teachers, after school professionals, library media specialists and camp counselors.

Course Purpose: The purpose of this e-course is to equip educators with the information and skills they need in order to get started with coding with students. Through a series of lessons and tasks, participants will gain the skills necessary to facilitate coding clubs, integrate coding, or host your own Hour of Code!

Course Description: Coding has never been more accessible and applicable to all ages! Thanks to block based coding languages such as Scratch, students and teachers can learn to code in a safe and easy environment.

Connect with people from all over the world to code robotics, machines, games and a wide array of digital maker projects, build your knowledge base and confidence here! This course will guide educators with NO CODING SKILLS AT ALL to be confident and comfortable helping students learn computational thinking, problem solving, and computer code in a variety of languages and formats.

Course Goals: The information provided in this course will teach you the following.

You will learn:

• Gain a basic understanding of what is meant by ‘Coding’.
• To explore “unplugged” coding games, activities, and resources available to you and your students.
• Learn how to begin coding with young learners.
• Explore self-paced courses that are available for students to help them gain exposure to the fundamentals of computer science.
• Demystify the basic concepts surrounding robotics.
• Unpack the term gamification and how it related to coding.