Today brought another visit from Sandra McAulay, whose heartfelt enthusiasm and desire to share knowledge and ideas are most welcome. I only wish that I could have taken more new ideas from the presentation. The analog coding activities presented were interesting, no question, but essentially the same as the coding activities presented during our earlier presentation on Coding Across the Curriculum. The emphasis on procedural thinking also closely echoed the Coding Across the Curriculum presentation. If this were not my third time going over these ideas within the last month (having attended the other aforementioned presentation twice) I would probably be quite excited by the topic.

The chance to practice with Scratch, Jr. was appreciated. I’ve seen Scratch coding used in the classroom and played around with it myself, but I didn’t know there was a simplified version available for iPads. Something to keep in mind for down the road.

The one big new idea I was able to take away from this presentation was the possibility of using coding as a vehicle for students to report their learning. It’s an interesting interdisciplinary possibility.