"How is this even possible?", you might ask. Well, it's all about computational thinking. By playing games which have a deeper meaning behind them you can stimulate the problem solving skills and show children how they can think like computers and software. The cool thing is that this can be done entirely without computers or even code! As we call it; CoderDojo Unplugged!
👉 New series started! 👈
Before we get started, I would like to tell you that I've decided to keep these blogs about teaching children to program going as a series! This is the 4th post so I will be numbering them from here on out. Definitely check out my previous posts on this subject!
👉 #3 Last Year We Taught 1024 Children To Program At The Same Time!
👉 #2 Worldwide Free Coding Clubs For Kids | CoderDojo Above All, Be Cool!
👉 #1 Teach Your Children To Code! Are They Prepared For The Black Box...
Hot Summer Day In 2016 At A Local Hotspot
So, teaching to code without actual computers, how does that work? Well, we put together an afternoon with 6 games that could be played outside and would stimulate computational thinking and help prepare children for coding. We chose 😅 to do this on what turned out to be the hottest ☀️ summer day of 2016 😎!
During this summer there was a temporary hotspot for your cultural, food, music, theater and relaxation fix in Leiden. It had several different areas and it was available to all sorts of local organizations and initiatives to hold events. Every week they would have different things going on varying from DJ's to the local basketball club giving a workshop. In this case, we came together with 96 kids to play games on the events area!
Six Different Games
With the help of sources like csunplugged.org we put together 6 games which the kids could play in groups. The kids were divided in groups of 4. To give you the simple math:
- 4 children per group
- 2 groups per game version (= 8 children)
- 2 versions of each game (= 16 children)
- 6 games (= 96 children)
The games we prepared were:
- Living Programming (Dutch) | Learn to think in steps
- Algorithms | Learn To Compose Steps
- Sorting Machine | Learn How Data Is Sorted Programmatically
- Minimal Spanning Tree | Learn How Networks Choose The Shortest Path
- Routing & Deadlock | Learn How Data Is Shipped In Packets
- Binary Numbers | Learn How The Binary System Works
We would then run each game for about 50 minutes of which 10 minutes would be to explain the game and set it up, 30 minutes to play the game and another 10 minutes to move to the next game. A big airhorn would mark the switch time. To make sure the groups would be mixed up we had the even group numbers rotate clock-wise and the odd group numbers rotate counter-clockwise. That ensured everybody would continuously meet other people and you would only be together with the same 8 people at most.
👉 Check out all those happy faces! 👈
This is a short after-movie which gives a good feel for that day.
But before you go, please take a moment to think about these questions 🙃:
❓ Are your children being taught to program?
❓ Do you think this is an important skill to learn at young age?
✏️ Let me know in the comments!
📷 All pictures have been released from copyright
by their photographers so we can use them in publications like this.
Thanks for reading!
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