Are schools ready to teach programming?
Programming and computational thinking are becoming parts of primary schools’ curriculum all over the world. Considering that programming might be a totally new subject to many primary school teachers I wanted to write a brief introduction to couple of products and tips I find helpful in teaching programming.
The bottom line at primary school is to teach thinking. Just executing different programming-related exercises or games is not enough. Diginatives can learn how to use a specific game/platform easily, but it doesn’t mean they learn about computational thinking. When schools order trainings they should always keep in mind not to order trainings that only concentrate on how to use a product. The training should empower teachers and help them to integrate computational thinking in their teaching.
There are a lot of good products out there but the problem is that they don’t empower beginners to teach programming. Instead of learning just specific programming concepts they should also learn how computational promotes cross-curricular skills and critical thinking.
For beginners I recommend a course, a book or a product that helps you to understand what it means to teach programming at school and how it can be done in practice. Finland, for instance, has got a network called Innokas, which organizes free trainings for teachers. Also it’s a good idea to join a ITC group for schools on facebook or set up one at your own school. It’s always better to share ideas, discuss together and find the best practises as a community.
A minor problem for a beginner is the amount of work that she/he has to do in order to learn computational thinking and programming basics. At the moment it’s not easy to find all the information in one place. If you want to get the basics of programming, understand why it is important to teach computational thinking and programming I really recommend trying Bomberbot.You get one month free trial during which you can use Bomberbot’s lesson plans, game and guides that help you to find your own way to teach. Bomberbot’s lesson plans are in Dutch, Finnish and English at the moment.
Once you’ve got the hang of what teaching programming and computational thinking, I recommend trying Code.org and for more advance exercises KhanAcademy. Code.org offers a lot of good exerices for different age groups. KhanAcademy is good way to motivate students who already have some basic skills and who want to learn more for example about programming languages and creating websites.
And teachers, you have the right to demand good tools for teaching computational thinking! It should be fun and at least according to my experience, it can also broaden your own thinking!
P.S Still not sure what computational thinking means? Check this short introduction.
Petra Raivonen
Currently writing my Master’s Thesis about teaching programming (University of Helsinki) and working at Bomberbot.
