Hi All!
Our school has just starting coding this year. I feel as though my students (second through fourth) are having a rather difficult time reading the directions about what to code and then following them. I am having to give a lot of guidance and support to the students in order for them to understand what to do. We only have 20-minutes once a week for coding, could that be the problem? Any advice or similar experiences are welcomed! Thank you!
I am having similar problems. I teach coding as a special (50 minutes a week) to all students in grades 1-5. I am using the P101 courses with my 3-5 graders and many students either don’t read the tutorial and just grab the blocks or it could be a language barrier since many are ELL. I end up going back and doing some reteaching or demonstrating what the project should actually do when finished. Very time consuming though.
I noticed that some of the Hour of Code activities read the tutorial out loud. It would be nice if the tutorials in the courses did the same. They could put a speaker icon next to each step/paragraph that students could click to have it read out loud or repeated. The Hour of Code implementation is still kind of clunky because it reads the entire tutorial page once through. There’s no way to stop it to do each step or listen again if a student didn’t catch it the first time.