Change Makers in Technology & 100 Lines of Code!

Our third and fourth graders have been busy working on refining their coding skills, including the use of loops and nested loops, on Code Studio. Students have been applying their understanding of perimeter, angles in geometry, and basic addition and subtraction to solve the coding puzzles in technology class. In fact, we are proud to announce that all of our students have now written 100 or more lines of code! In fact, some students have even written 500 or more lines of code!

We introduced the idea of “pair programming” at both grade levels to give students a taste of what it’s like to be a real computer programmer. We discussed the importance of communication, giving constructive feedback, and being open to new ideas. Students enjoyed learning from each other and bouncing their ideas with a friend before executing their ideas in code. They were even reminding each other of when to use their four computational thinking strategies! The students had so much fun with their partners that many of them requested pair programming for the next few weeks.

In fourth grade, we continued to study the change makers in technology. To our list of esteemed members, we have now added Hadi Partovi, who grew up during the Iran-Iraq war and learned how to code as a child because he spent a lot of time indoors. Hadi Partovi went on to create Code Studio, so that students everywhere can learn how to code just like he did and enter into a field where there is a strong demand for skilled programmers. 

We’ve also introduced Marissa Mayer, current CEO of Yahoo and the first female computer engineer at Google. We learned that she did not start learning to code until she was a freshmen at Stanford University and that with some hard work and persistence, she helped to develop the code that powers the Google search engine. In her interview, she said that if one can “… push through the feeling of being scared and the feeling of taking a risk, really amazing things happen”. Our students wholeheartedly agree and were so inspired that they started to brainstorm different apps they can create by using code!