Computational Thinking (Day #8 of DFI)

We looked at the third Manaiakalani kaupapa of Empowerment this week. Some concepts about this principle include: 

• empowering learners and teachers is about the advancing of rangatiratanga - the idea of people taking back control of their own lives 
• learners have 'voice, ownership and choice' in their learning
• devices have become more than simply tools - they can give us access to new learning environments 

We also had a look at computational thinking tasks by visiting different sites and having a play. It is interesting to see that there are many basic block coding sites that follow similar steps (which makes it easier for students to use). Some of these included:

• Lightbot
• Minecraft
• Scratch Jnr
• Kodable
• Code.org

These sites are probably more suited to the students in my class. I like how they generally start out quite basic, allowing you to succeed and work out what to do before becoming progressively more challenging and, in doing so, give you the opportunity to make mistakes and have to debug. 

There were also coding sites that were text based. These are a bit more advanced and included:

• Compute It (where you are given the code and have to follow it)
• Code Combat
• Trinket

I feel that these would probably be too challenging for the majority of my students (but I may have to investigate some of these a bit more myself!)

During a breakout, I had a chance to explore Scratch a little more. Unfortunately there seemed to be a few problems along the way with work not saving and having to start over. I ran into difficulty when I tried to share it and lost what I had done a second time. The upside of all of this is that, the more I revisited it, the more familiar I became with using the tools. This is something I would be interested in exploring with my students, though I think I would like to have more time to play around with the site first.

Below is my third attempt with using Scratch to move a sprite and make it talk. Some instructions to help:

• Use the arrow keys to move the sprite across, up and down
• Use the flag to get back to the starting position
• Use the space key to make the sprite talk