Misc 5 Best Strategies to Teach Your Students Coding

5 Best Strategies to Teach Your Students Coding

As The Mercury News can probably tell us, the extensive field of technology will come to include more and more coding as time advances. Being a teacher, it might be in your area of expertise to pass on your knowledge to students. But we know, this may prove to be hard for you. Not only for you, but for many teachers out there. It includes numerous concepts, some that are quite advanced and difficult to learn and, also, teach. This is why we are here today, discussing this fairly important topic - what strategies can you employ to teach your students coding.

Make it a Game

One step in getting to teach any student coding is to make the process a game. As we know, games are something modern kids enjoy a lot. They have their characters in those games, perform tasks and get some stats out of that. They compete against each other; they go after goals to eventually make their characters be one of the best in the game.

So, you can employ this coding strategy. Make the overall experience look more like a game. Every quiz, every homework, every positive participation can give your students experience points. You can put them in some sort of scoreboard and, thus, they’d be more prone to participate and learn so as to get ahead. Set specific levels, make up tasks, put up goals for them to achieve. Then, by seeing it as a game, rather than some boring schooling, students can get really into your coding classes.

Challenge Them to Create

Another means of making coding for students be a more desired subject and an interesting one, indeed, is to put up some challenges. Have them come up with ideas for programs and tools that can benefit their classroom. As a class, choose one of the projects. Or set up different groups to work on different projects.

Now, the next step is starting coding those different projects. They’d be motivated to get something out of the experience in general, not only as a schooling and learning, but in having a polished end project that gives them certain benefits.

Incorporate Technology in Education

When you want to implement more coding strategies to get your students learn better and to teach them coding at the end, you’d actually need to employ more technology in your classroom. Boring talks no longer work, especially when we are talking about this particular subject. When you wish to teach your students coding, you’d need to incorporate laptops, projectors, the usage of websites, more Internet time, and other similar strategies.

Presentations are a good way to start. Other means include the specific teaching applications and technology, such as an interactive whiteboard. Sure, this all would require you to change the curriculum and your methods of teaching a bit or a lot. Start small and work your way upwards.

Project-Based Teaching and Learning

Talking about coding teaching, there are few things as good as implementing a problem-based teaching. This then leads to problem-based learning. Or project-based, as the other name goes. This means you now won’t simply give lectures. No, you’d set up problems for the children to solve. That method of teaching has proved to work in numerous subjects. It’s definitely a good one for teaching kids to code.

When they learn coding, they’d need to try different things. Some of them would work, others wont and there would be the need to adjust the strategy, make corrections, and repeat the try-out. You can use the try-check-repeat method in teaching coding, too. Give a problem to the students and have them come up with a solution. Multiple solutions are encouraged, should the problem be open to such.

Practice Failure

In coding there will be a lot of failed attempts. No program is perfect from the get-go. There would be a lot of bugs for the programmers to fix. Many improvements will need to be done. Lots of additional work will be required. So, you need to teach children that failure is okay and can be used as a stepping stone to improvement and work towards making things much better. To do so, you’d need to start by practicing failure.

This can be done in a variety of times. For instance, try a debugging practice. This is a project that is based on particular programs that need to be debugged. They can be set to be fixed easily or a lot harder, depending on how advanced the students are. It would be best if the easiest solution isn’t actually the proper one. Teach kids to fail and try again to set them for success. Give them a coding challenge and have them work not only to make a finished project but also put various improvements suggested by you or by their classmates.

Conclusion

Of course, don’t start it all-out. Begin small, consider the kids’ age, grade, experience, and knowledge. Build gradually and with the necessary considerations in mind. Think of ways you can incorporate coding into your day-to-day classroom experiences so as to have children be more accustomed to it. Let them progress in their own pace and set them side ‘challenges’ if appropriate.

Be it through learning from the best sites for essay writing, from their favorite computer game, or from an app - you can incorporate many side elements into your teaching. It doesn’t need to be done in a boring lecture-style way. No, you can use gamification, problem-based learning, technology, and other useful tools, materials, and other elements.

Coding is a skill your students will need to be great in their future career. Not all of them will go into it for a living, but the soft-skills they’d get from coding will serve them well in any profession. Computational thinking, for instance, is going to be a great skill to possess in many areas of life. So, as you can see, not only is coding important but the coding leaching strategies are, too. We hope that ours will prove to be of great help in your journey and you’d be able to utilize them to provide the best teaching for your students.