An Hour of Code at Girard College
A few weeks ago I signed up as a volunteer for the Hour of Code, a global initiative to provide a short introduction to computer science for people not familiar with it. In the US, the Hour of Code is especially useful to teach the basics of computing to kids in schools, since not many of them are able to offer a dedicated subject to this important area of knowledge.
Girard College is a boarding school in Philadelphia with a long history of providing children in need with quality education. Ms. H. K. Kim, a math coach at Girard, invited me to spend some time with a class of 28 seventh graders.
The appointment was today. First, I told the kids what interface design is and why it’s important. I then showed them the mockups of an app I’m working on.
I could see some interest building up, but we were in the room to discuss computer science. I fired up Xcode and showed them a working demo of the app. Woohoo, excitement! 🎉
After demoing some features live, I showed the kids my app’s Storyboard. Since Storyboards show how the different screens of an app are linked together, they’re a good place to start talking about the intersection of design and code. I explained that the computer (they all knew that the hearts of our modern-day “phones” are, in fact, nifty computers) perform certain instructions when a screen appears, or when the user interacts with it. That’s it: these instructions are computer code. What’s more, these instructions aren’t fundamentally different from the instructions they themselves had written a few days earlier to solve an Angry Birds maze.
Nobody asked the question I was expecting: “Why should I learn how to code if I’m not interested in becoming a programmer?” I gave a response anyway: no matter what career you choose, knowing how to code will enable you to do your work better. Think: you can be a journalist who can analyze vast datasets to support his research, an anthropologist who can plot thousands of data points to show her findings, a teacher who can create his own interactive visualizations to explain complex subjects.
Then we went up to the library, where each student had access to a computer. They made their way through Code.org’s Frozen puzzle, which subtly introduces the concept of loops. Built upon the work of Seymour Papert’s LOGO and MIT’s Scratch, this tutorial manages to be engaging and educational at the same time.
Time flies when you’re having fun, and my hour quickly ran out. Students left with a basic notion of what loops are and what they’re useful for. I wanted to take this further, to allow them to inspect loops and play with them. Before I left Girard, I told Ms. H. K. she should introduce students to Choc, a neat toolkit that empowers them to do just that. I’m hoping to hear back from them in the near future!
Of course these children didn’t achieve a fluency in programming that came close to matching their use of spoken language […] But like children who have spent a vacation with foreign-speaking cousins, they were clearly on their way to “speaking computer.” — Seymour Papert
I’d like to thank Ms. H. K., the students and the staff at Girard College for this opportunity to share with them. I’m learning how to teach, and every interaction I have with students is immensely valuable.
