It’s been an eventful year, and, not surprisingly, things did not turn out as I had planned. Most of my more sobering moments revolved around teaching computer science, which I enjoy immensely but in my second year realized that my approach was a bit wrong-headed. This dovetailed with the ideas that were percolating due to my involvement in C21, so I decided to try out a combination of Design Thinking, independent learning and drag-and-drop coding (in the form of MIT’s App Inventor) to try to do several things at once:
- Try to make programming more relevant, and hence more attractive to a wider audience.
- Give a seemingly-different context to concepts that we have studied in the first two terms to help students see that the principles are language-independent.
- Give students a more sandbox-like environment, so that they can more easily be creative in their work.
The real test of this approach will be the outcome of their app-building project, which will begin next week and take the rest of the school year. Watch this space for updates.
Here is a link to my reflect-deck; thanks to everyone who made C21 a rich and rewarding experience; you all seem to be very good at your jobs, it’s very inspiring!
Hey Adam,
Thanks for the MIT App inventor! I will share this with our department at the school. I look forward to seeing how things go for your students in the coming weeks with their app building project!
Looking forward to reconnecting on Friday at the F2F!