Good, solid literacy instruction is the right of every student and the responsibility of all educators. School leaders recognize the need for literacy instruction to become a schoolwide priority—in all courses, not just English and the humanities.
To support that position, I met with our computer science teacher at the end of last year. We discussed ways he could assist his students in reading this year. As we analyzed one of his lessons, I noticed the multitude of directions students needed to follow to create an accurate program. We surmised that if students worked on comprehending the directions, they might find greater success in the class, on the exam, and hopefully throughout their academic courses.
We wanted his students to think and read like programmers, so we focused on computational literacy, which “requires being able to do computer programming at some level,” according to Bruce Sherin of Northwestern University. Students need to understand how computer programs work in order to build the foundation to learn programming. Luckily, computational literacy is accessible even to people who have no computer science training because the concepts are reflected in real world situations and general problem solving.
I worked with the teacher to create a lesson that would seamlessly embed vocabulary into his programming class to highlight the critical importance of verbs when following programming instructions.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
