Run’s Teacher Uses Coding To Help Students Learn In Summer School | Nvdaily

QUICKSBURG – Kathryn Staton is teaching math and reading this summer at Honey Run Elementary School (formerly Ashby Lee Elementary School), and she’s decided to do something a little different – teach her students to third year coding or computer programming.

During the school year, Staton is the school’s technology teacher and has taught coding to his Kindergarten to Grade 4 students for the past seven years.

“As a professor of technology, I’m always trying to introduce a little computer science somewhere along the line,” Staton said Monday morning. “So I created the ‘Summer of Code’. So we did some coding every week.”

Her eight students spend about 30 minutes a day coding with video games on school iPads.

Staton used the Osmo for Schools program, which offers a variety of games that students can play and learn.

“Coding is like a vegetable,” Staton said. “It’s good for you. They don’t even realize how much they’re learning and it’s just fun. If you can make a student learn as much as they do while having fun, that’s a win- winner.”

This is the last week of the six week summer course. Staton said she tries to do different things every week.

In the first week, the students played a dance game.

“It was like a dance studio,” Staton said. “So they had to create their characters and have dance moves.”

In the third week, students learned the Blockly Games, which are block programming lessons that include trying to work in a maze.

In week four, students learned how to use CodeSpark Academy, which allows students to work their way through Donut Detective levels and teaches them how to sequence and create a story or game with code.

For the past two weeks, the class has played a game called Osmo for School’s Coding with Awbie, which is the favorite game of most of their students. Students follow a series of commands to guide the character, Awbie, to collect strawberries and through forests, caves, jungles, beaches, a snow-capped mountain and a volcano.

Staton said she asked the students what they learned and “They told me about role models. They can solve problems.”

“They can ask Awbie to pick up all the strawberries. I don’t think all the verbiage is there yet, but they know there is a lot of learning going on,” she said. “They also learned to work together because some of the kids will be away for some reason and they will come in and be like, ‘oh, what are we doing? “And a whole bunch of them will flock to them and be like, ‘oh, we’re doing that’ and show them.”

Student Uriyah Payton, 7, said Awbie was his favorite game and was already at level 3. Uriyah said he enjoyed learning coding.

“I like to solve puzzles,” Uriyah said. “Learn to solve problems.”

8-year-old student Jonathan Funkhouser said he enjoyed playing a game that involved music.

“It teaches us about music and what the role model is,” Jonathan said. “You can create patterns with coding. Coding can create patterns or help us understand patterns.”

Coding isn’t the only thing Staton students do, as it teaches them basic math as well. Jonathan said he had learned to tell the time over the past six weeks.

“I learned a quarter of an hour and a quarter of an hour,” he says.

During the school year, Staton said she had around 15-20 students per class and spent around two months coding. She also has an after school coding club.

Even though the students are very young, Staton said it is important for them to learn coding from an early age.

“Even if they don’t become programmers or even in the computer field, it helps them acquire the basic skills they need,” she said. “Solve problems, how to work with other people. There are a lot of skills they learn from coding that don’t necessarily apply to coding.”

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