iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

"A fascination with cryptography led high school math teacher Paul Kelley to develop a way to use the code-building practice to explain algebraic concepts to students at Anoka High School in Anoka, Minnesota. Kelley wanted to tap into ways math is used in everyday life — places where students would never give it a second thought — to spark their interest so they would stop asking how they would “use this stuff,” he said in an interview.

“I showed them, for example, how cryptography gets the credit card numbers from their computers to Amazon without the bad guys intercepting it, and all the mathematics that go into it,” said Kelley."

Our New York Times Best Sellers, Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World and The Friendship Code are out now!

Last week on Twitter I mentioned that Logo was my introduction to computers and programming. Today we have many more ways to introduce students to programming and coding. Here are some good resources that you can use to introduce students to programming and coding.

Every year students all over the world celebrate the Hour of Code. The goal is to set aside one hour to give everyone a chance to learn about coding and its fun aspects. On code.org, organizers release a themed game to help build excitement. There have been Frozen, Star Wars and Moana coding themes, all to build students’ knowledge base but also to show them that coding really isn’t that difficult.

Coding helps to develop not only computer skills, but also logic, math, problem solving, design and more. Coding can happen in any classroom and touches every ­subject area. The skills that children acquire while learning to code can impact them far beyond the devices they program with.

Understanding the steps it takes to make a character move from one side of a maze to the other teaches students to analyze their thinking. If they fail, the code provides feedback to show them that they don’t have to be right every time — they just need to find out where they went wrong and try again.

The Hour of Code is a popular event. Just this past year, more than 164,000 individual coding events were held in classrooms around the world. However, in many of those classrooms, coding happens for just that hour, and then things get back to the normal routine. Coding doesn’t have to be a one-hour or one-time event, though. It can last all year long.

Here are five ways to make the Hour of Code last all year:

When Sasha Ariel Alston pursued her love for coding, she noticed there were never many girls ― especially girls of color ― pursuing it, too. That’s why she decided to write a children’s book to encourage girls to learn about coding and STEM fields at an early age. 

Alston is a 19-year-old Pace University student getting a major in information systems and a minor in marketing. She spent two years writing Sasha Savvy Loves to Code, a kids’ book about a 10-year-old who becomes interested in coding, just like Alston.

“The purpose of the book is just to get girls interested in coding and to provide basic coding terms,” she said.