Last week was busy. It started with a presentation for the Google in Education online summit. I spoke on the theme “Turning Ideas into Reality” – which is what Code Week is all about. It’s also the slogan on a big banner that has graced my classroom for the past year.
One of my observations was that I sometimes feel like a “one trick pony” because for much of my teaching career, I’ve been delivering the same message – even when it has been highly unpopular to say it: that children can learn essential problem-solving skills and develop higher-order thinking skills through creating their own interactive multimedia applications to demonstrate their mastery of a subject.
In the next four weeks we’re going to see an explosion of creativity across Europe with hundreds of events put on to show how much fun coding can be.
On Monday and Tuesday of this week we held a couple of preliminary events to chat about what we could put on in our city for Code Week. There’s enough interest in putting on an introductory hour of code for people in our local community. We’ll have that up as a Code Week event as soon as we’ve finished the planning for it. We’ll also do something special for Ada Lovelace Day and a “Code as Art” competition, I’ll say more about these in another post…