Coding Challenges and Successes

I have been coding with students for years now.  Most Decembers we spend problem solving and students love it.  I did too.  For a while.  Then I started questioning how this authentically fit in my mission to "grow readers."  I struggled with this significantly.  When I did a collaborative coding project several years back it made sense.  Simply exploring different coding activities didn't feel so authentic and true to who I want to be as a librarian.  So, it was time to change things up.  

Student work for our introductory coding lesson

The pros:

• My brain eats up coding and this could have been a game-changing moment for me as a student if I had been introduced to coding at a young age.  
• This is problem solving! 
• This isn't taught anywhere else in our school!  
• This is opportunity and exposure for students!  

The cons:

• I am abandoning reading books to students for the month to do this.  
• This doesn't feel authentic (even though it DOES feel so fun and exciting). 

So.... I married the two.  (See my post about coding with diverse books for other activities).

In this activity, 4th and 5th grade students chose a book to listen to, identified the character's goal, then coded the character's success (the steps he/she took to reach his/her goal).  The main character in each book is a child because I wanted my students to see a child with challenges rise through the challenge and succeed.  I chose books with varying

• Challenges
• Time periods
• Ethnicities
• Genders

I gave students a brief description including all of these components so they could make an educated decision before they chose their book.

Students choose a book

Students then 

• Listened to their chosen story 
• Identified the main character's goal
• Identified actions the character took to succeed 

  

We wrapped up our class by sharing what we read/wrote with each other.  The "Jaguar" folks shared their goal and some action examples.  The other groups shared their findings.  

My Takeaways/Concerns

This introductory lesson helped me frame how coding and literacy can work together.  I was concerned that students wouldn't buy in to "coding" in this new light (knowing that they KNEW fun coding games were around the corner), but they surprised me.  They took it and ran with it!

Resources

Coding with Diverse Picture Books

Coding the Nutcracker

Student slides