Editor’s Message
Into a New Age
The chil
dren and teachers of Ontario are now into a new age of teaching where coding is part of the script. Coding is not just something you do, it is a tool you can use in order to do something. These things are only limited by our imagination and our willingness to work hard to achieve our goals.
Coding is also a means of communication. It can be used to communicate a message to the person using the code, but it is also a way for a student to communicate their learning to their teacher. In math, we are used to numbers, pictures, and words. To this, we can now add code. As teachers, we can read through our student’s code and get a very real sense of the way they went about solving a problem. Getting our students to talk about their code gives teachers yet another vector to understanding their students’ thinking.
Finally, coding is a way of thinking about a problem that is both open and systematic. As students learn to think computationally, decompose problems, seek out patterns, abstract these patterns and write algorithms in the form of code, they learn how to problem-solve in a way that compliments the regular mathematical problem solving they are used to.
With this issue, we bring you some ideas of things you can do with code – not just math – and its effects in the classroom. We hope that you will find these articles helpful to you and your students.
Please contact:
Editor: ibrodie2 @ uwo.ca
Assistant editor: hsezer2 @ uwo.ca
Our articles:
The See, Think, & Wonder of Computational Thinking in the Intermediate Classroom
Sheri Rowe
Julia Houston & Meg Morrison
Beginning Code in Kindergarten: Unplugged Coding for Beginner Students and Teachers
Connor McVeen, Claire Dorion & Candace Cronin