Hour of Code 2016!

A big thank you to the Village School math team for inviting me to guest teach Scratch this past Thursday. Check out the "Hour of Code" studio I created, that contains 8 oldies (among them, maze game "Amazed", interactive quiz "Name that Instrument", 2 player collision "Bumper Cars", and "FlappyCone"). Plus, each Village School class added at least 1 game with questions I'm working on remixing to address programming that exceeded our 45 minutes together. We addressed basic computer science concepts parsing these games, including programming event handlers, loops, and stored procedures through nested conditionals, algorithms, and defining variables. But beyond this, we also discussed best programming practices, as in, why use stored procedures (to standardize scripting to ease hand offs within a programming team), ways to operationally define variable names, and how to debug code block by block.

And talking about the "big idea" behind the Hour of Code I found this great article where the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Megan Smith, participated in a DC school session, and in response to a student leaning towards "thanks but no thanks" because her career interests (counseling) didn't seem associated to coding, encouraged her to think about: "If you use coding you can see all kinds of insights about people. There's a lot of data science, if you use it, you can help a lot of people by looking at patterns. You can see how people interact, or maybe even thinking about communities, like our community here - but what about community online and on Snapchat?"

It's exactly this "big idea" thinking citizen educators, programmers in the real world, can and have to offer to make coding real to kids! And we need to fund this, too, so more of us get out there to spread the word ;)