Day 1: Thinking Like Computers

I've been looking forward to this day for months. I had planned, thought, rethought, changed plans, and finally decided on the activity to kick off this quarter of 5th Grade's Creative Expression -- CODING!

There are so many excellent resources out there for learning to code, I've decided not to limit our learning to one tool. This way, if one way of learning this is not interesting to someone, she is not stuck with that way for the next several weeks.

The first day was all about introductions. After making sure that the girls all knew who I am, we then started building a picture of what a computer scientist is. Of course, there are lots of stereotypes about computer scientists and programmers, but we talked about how these are the people behind our favorite games, apps, and websites and that the job of a computer scientist is more than just being a tech geek. The girls noted that computer scientists would also need to be creative and artistic to be successful. We also talked about how computer programming is about problem solving. We talked about problems like puzzles. Just like you learn to put a puzzle together by starting with the corners, there are certain ideas that will help you solve problems with computers -- you just have to let yourself think that way.

To introduce computational thinking to the students, we talked about how computers read and store data by formatting it as some version of on or off. Many said that they knew that computers used 0s and 1s and we talked about how this is a version of on and off. Each student got a binary decoder key and a couple of codes to decipher.

Once they understood how the binary codes worked, they were then given binary strips with two letters to encode their initials. I used this as an opportunity to begin learning and remembering all of the students' names.

We then worked on deciphering and creating longer, more complex codes on graph paper.

I hope the girls enjoyed day 1 as much as I did!