Carrie Antoniazzi came from Science World today to speak to us about computational thinking and how to implement it in the classroom. She was kind enough to allow us time to go through some activities ourselves like coding in real life and coding without computers (writing down directional instructions for a human robot to follow) and the Knight’s Tour board (starting at one and ending at one and filling each square once). These activities were highly engaging for us as adults, so I can only imagine that students would have a great time engaging with and solving these activities.
I thought it was very cool that she shared a video with us that exemplified computational thinking. The video was of a dad asking his children to give him instructions on how to make a peanut and jelly sandwich. If the instructions were too vague, he would do funny things to show them that the instructions were not clear enough and they would use their logical reasoning and use patterns in order to ameliorate their instructions.
I will definitely be using these activities in my future classrooms as they are straight forward, yet challenging.
I can really connect with you on the video during the presentation, as I said it was the highlight of the presentation for me. I think it was very funny too and it really captured the audience’s attention. Good work! The blog is very detailed and specific.