Digital Skills Archives | Page 5 of 5

How to Bring Creativity into Coding

Posted on September 4, 2018September 21, 2022 by user

HOW TO: Bring Creativity into Coding

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Find out how over 500 12 year-old girls show to enhance daily life by creating wearable technology at school

Enhance Traditional Learning and Teaching with the SAMR Model

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We got great feedback from you about our last article on transformative teaching, here is a tried and tested model you can follow to simply use a range of technologies to enhance traditional teaching

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Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Tech – You Are An Expert in Your Subject

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Read this story about our experience that shows how teacher’s understanding of the subject that they teach is the critical link between technology and the real world

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Published on 30th July, 2018.

Set Your Students Challenges – You’ll Be Impressed!

Posted on August 29, 2018September 21, 2022 by user

In Issue 2, we wrote an article about why teachers shouldn’t be afraid of tech because a teacher’s role becomes one of facilitator and contextual expert . Shelly Songy really brings this to life in her article for EdSurge: ‘How a Tough Challenge Taught My Students More About Coding Than I Ever Could’. We’ll summarise what she did here but it’s well worth a read of her article.

Shelly was teaching a unit on the basics of HTML when she found herself in front of a class that had surpassed her knowledge with 45 minutes of class time left. She reflects that ‘the realization that the students knew as much, or more, than I did about that topic made me feel very anxious inside’. So, what did she do?

She challenged them.

At first she challenged them to ‘find interesting aspects of other websites and research and discover for themselves the HTML tags needed to include those in their own websites’ and it was a huge success. ‘What followed was an amazing example of student motivation, creativity, resourcefulness and personalized learning at its best’. Students were in control of their learning and they thrived.

This was only the beginning though, only the first project. Shelly’s students, already beyond her knowledge and delivering incredible results, would now progress to a second project taking their learning even further. So how did she manage this?

She challenged them again. This time she brought real world application into the mix. She challenged them ‘to design truly professional-looking websites that would be critiques by college professors and published live on the web for anyone to access around the world.’ They were given total freedom to decide what was expected – no set rubric, no timeframes.

What did she find? Her own words sum it up perfectly: ‘The results simply astounded me! This open-ended challenge brought out an internal motivation and non-complacent drive within each of my students to strive for excellence and make their websites even better. I was no longer a teacher; I was a facilitator and encourager. The students were empowered. Anything the students needed to know to build their websites, they taught themselves and used applied problem-solving to troubleshoot the errors that arose. I set the expectation extremely high from the beginning of the second website, and they absolutely came through.’

So, what can we learn from Shelley? We think there are two key takeaways.

Setting students challenges not only allows them to develop their subject knowledge far beyond a standard curriculum, but also brings out creativity, problem solving skills, intrinsic motivation and allows students to personalise their own learning.
Embrace your role as facilitator. Guide the students through increasingly complex challenges and the results will astound you. Kids have big ideas. Teachers help make them real.

Setting Up Your Own Makerspace

Posted on August 10, 2018October 20, 2022 by user

Whether your school has already set up its Makerspace and wants to develop it further or is considering setting one up, this article in EdSurge by Parker Thomas a school consultant is a helpful guide.

Three points stand out to us:

Start with the learning outcomes: “Define the skills, knowledge and habits that kids will learn or develop in your space.”
Develop a community: “Define the culture for the space.”
Make it cross-curricular: “Based on the culture and the desired skills, knowledge and abilities, determine appropriate integration points in the rest of your curriculum and the life of the school.”

While you are setting up your Makerspace, start engaging your students with a free Makerspace Empowerment Program Kit from Particle!

Why Coding Has a Place in Every Classroom

Posted on August 10, 2018October 4, 2023 by user

What is the role of educators? Fong Ly, an educator from the US, sums it up well in his article for eSchoolNews: ‘it’s our job to figure out how to equip students with the skills they need to be well-prepared for college and careers. One of the best ways teachers can help kids prepare is by犀利士 developing softer skills to make them future-ready. Introducing coding to the classroom does just that.

What do we know about the careers we are preparing students for? This is a challenging question because the answer is fairly unknown. Industries are changing like never before, but we know that the world is digitizing. Technology skills are increasingly fundamental to the world of work. We also know that ‘softer skills,’ or 21st-century skills, such as critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, curiosity, and creativity, are held in higher regard than ever before.

Frequent misconceptions of coding include: It is only for students who are good at math, want careers in technology companies or ICT Classes. Irrespective of your interests, you will use code and the skills and thinking developed through programming. These include computational and design thinking, logic, and reasoning skills!).

Scenario:

A few restaurant owners are deciding what to put on their new menu. Before they make their decision, they need to consider what customers generally purchase from their restaurant. Technology enables people to collect data to make data-driven, tactical decisions. The Point of Sale (POS) system allows restaurant owners to see which menu items were popular among their customers. They find that the pasta was the most ordered type of food, so they start brainstorming on additional options, cooking, and testing out which ones perform the best. This is an example of design thinking being used in daily life:

Coders may use computational and design thinking every day, but so do restaurant owners. Everyone benefits from digital skills learning, regardless of their background or industry. This is why coding is the gateway to digital skills and the creation of solutions – it helps you become future-proof.

So what does more integration of technology learning in a school look like?

We believe coding should be present in all subjects, whether it’s a code club or a computer science class. Otherwise, not all students can develop these skills. However, by bringing technology projects into all subjects, we align these vital skills with the interests of all students. This helps to prepare them for their future. The subject becomes the context, and the projects create a more engaging way for students to either learn the concepts of the subject or become a content vessel to present what they are learning in the class.

Fong Ly and his school, Amana Academy, have the same ethos.

He shares their approach to their curriculum in his article – it is ‘based on an expeditionary learning framework, meaning that teachers develop curriculum that involves all content areas and encourages collaboration across subjects. This means we’re training multiple skills at the same time. So, for example, we identified that coding was a great asset that could be integrated into all subjects….’ Find out more about Long Fy’s approach here. Students can use it and benefit from it at school, home, and daily life, even after their formal education and into their workspaces.

Are you bringing technology projects into a range of subjects at your school? Tell us more by emailing us at info@bsd.education and have a chance to be featured in one of our newsletters!

Interested in learning bringing coding into your classrooms? Reach out to us here.

Bring Creativity into Coding

Posted on July 30, 2018October 20, 2022 by user

Historically, coding projects has been seen in isolation as purely a ‘tech’ skill, focused on logic and reasoning rather than creativity. However, this is changing as it becomes increasingly clear that technology needs to be part of every solution.

Students need creativity when coming up with solutions and designing end products. You can help your students understand and apply the creative elements of coding by giving the project a creative context or encouraging them to focus on the end product and user.

Making a project creative:

In 2018, we worked with 520 girls from local schools in Hong Kong on designing wearable technology. With a theme of creating things to enhance daily life, the girls had free reign over their designs.

They had to learn and apply coding skills and think about how they could use them creatively. As a result, we have seen light-up coats for dogs, light-up umbrellas for when it rains and gets darker, and temperature-sensitive flashing t-shirts.

By giving a more creative context for their project, students understood that coding could be used for many different things.

Focus on the end product:

At BSD, all of our coding projects finish with an end product. This isn’t just because it is fun for a student to build something, but it encourages them to think about who will use their product and why. So get your students to build an app by applying the design cycle.

As part of this, students need to prototype, get feedback and think about UI and UX. They need to be creative to build a well-designed, appealing, and functional product for the desired audience.

Have you tried coding projects that focused on the creative side of coding? We want to hear from you! Please send us your work/student’s work or project ideas at info@bsd.education!

Tag: Digital Skills