Teacher's guide

This is a guide for teachers. But it is, actually, a guide for enthusiasts, lecturers, parents, professionals and for everybody who might not have teaching experience, but who can make a difference in classrooms and code clubs.

Its aim is to help them encourage children (and maybe adults too) learn about computing. It will provide teachers and parents with activities that can help children to learn about coding, computers and computational thinking in a playful way.

This guide is for teachers who want to engage their students in a new learning experience using innovative technologies in an easy and stimulating way. Teachers should not focus on presenting solutions to coding problems; but, instead, on emphasizing the process of discovery in the class, driving their students to develop strategies to find their own creative solutions. The answers are not relevant, the important part is to inspire the students to ask their teachers (and themselves) interesting questions.

The real difficulty with computing is that it evolves very quickly. If we teach a today’s 8-year-old kid the trending programming language, most probably, when he becomes 10, it will be out of date. So, instead of teaching a specific coding language, our aim is to help students to develop their skills and a cognitive toolbox that helps them to face the challenges of a new and changing world. This includes general competencies like: creativity, autonomy, cooperation and teamwork and, more specifically, heuristic learning and computational thinking.

Becoming digitally literate and learning to code and think computationally is now an essential part of every child’s life. As educators, we have identified a need to develop, test and publish resources to help schools not only implement programming in computing lessons, but also to be able to embed programming into education across subjects and disciplines. We want to show how easy it is to put technology into the classroom in creative and playful ways. This will help to emphasize discovery and exploration. This will also show how weaving computing into different subjects can help to create an environment for playful and deep learning.

The guide mainly consists of a set of example activities. These sometimes rely on specific equipment, but often require nothing more than a computer with an internet connection. We have tried to use technology that is freely available or can be easily acquired at low cost. We should also say that the guide should be seen as a hacker’s playground: we have taken ideas from many places and collected together activities that we have adapted from the educational community. The purpose of the guide is to be hacked! It should not be seen as a prescription or a “course” to be followed, but as a selection of snacks to be tasted, mixed and seasoned in whatever way you choose.

We have not really invented anything, instead we are educational hackers. We have hacked some of the ideas of Seymour Papert, Mitchel Resnick, Maria Montessori, Maria Antonia Canals, etc… so we would be delighted if you refused to “follow the instructions”. The secret is not in the robots, or the computers, or the tablets, it is in the imagination.

As Seymour Papert said: “The question is not what the computer will do to us. The question is what we will make with the computer”.

The activities that we are proposing are fully in line with the Maker Movement and they have been designed as tinkering activities: curiosity-driven playful inventions where participating children can improve something by making changes to it.

Our vision is skeptical about learning-to-code initiatives that focus exclusively on developing skills to get a good job. We want the children to learn how to use code to express their own ideas in a creative way. We really think that computational thinking can help to develop creativity, critical thinking and teamwork.

What is the Playful Coding Project? Where does this guide come from?

This guide is the result of the 2-year European Project called “Early Mastery. 21st Century Literacy Learn2Code & Code2Learn: How to Playfully Motivate School Kids To Master Computer Programing” (Playfulcoding). This project was funded by Erasmus+ (EU Program for Education, Training, Youth and Sport). At the heart of the project there is the belief that European young people must be creative, innovative and entrepreneurial, with deep knowledge about advanced technologies.

Early Mastery team is composed by around 30 people from 8 different institutions, from 5 European countries, with a common aim: we have interest and passion for education and technology, robots, creativity, science, maths, storytelling... Our profiles are heterogeneous: we are school teachers who work with children and professors; we are foreign language teachers and postdoctoral researchers; we are computing teachers from schools and lecturers from universities. No matter where we work or the position we occupy, we are all passionate about our subjects.

The consortium was carefully selected. Schools were chosen by the University of Girona for their existing experience in implementing coding activities into the curriculum and universities were selected from their history and experience in assisting schools with training and support.

The partners of this grant are:

• Ysgol Bro Hyddgen, Machynlleth, UK
• Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
• Universitat de Girona, Girona, Spain
• Escola Veïnat-Salt, Girona, Spain
• Constantin Ianculescu High-School, Craiova, Romania
• University of Craiova, Craiova, Romania
• University of Bourgogne, Le Creusot, France
• Esebel SRL, Perugia, Italy

Over the course of the project we have worked together and worked with children in different countries. We have tested each other’s ideas, criticised them, and improved them. It has been a learning process for all of us. This book is our way of passing our learning on to you. Please take it, criticise it, and help us carry on learning.

Goals

We do not want just to provide you useful lesson plans and ideas for teaching computing. We also want to promote a larger set of pedagogical goals and principles:

• Motivation and enthusiasm for learning: Robots, tablets, cameras and computers are like magnets for most of the children. This is an intrinsic factor we can take profit of.
• Creativity: to express themselves, to imagine and create new artifacts.
• Collaboration: Team work.
• Communication: sharing ideas and results.
• To give and receive feedback, in the class and with the class, with the team partners, with the world through internet, in a fair, etc.
• Learning from mistakes. When we make mistakes and learn from them, eventually we learn to not be afraid of the mistakes.
• Technology should be playful.

In the workshop or the classroom

• Remember results are not important, the important part is the journey. Don’t Do not stress the need to finish, don’t do not worry about diversions. Slow learning can be deep learning.
• Ask the children to show and tell what they are doing, to share the problems, to communicate with each other, to help each other, to teach each other.
• Do not n’t answer questions directly, let the students discover for themselves. The answer to “How do I do this?” can become “What do you think this button does?”
• Don’t Do not touch keyboards, don’t touch a single mouse. Let the students do everything.
• Give positive feedback and encouragement to all the students, highlighting progress.

And finally... We hope you find something of value in this book. We have certainly found the process of writing it valuable

Yours,

The Playful Coding team