Building robots and resilience at Carlin

There was a buzz throughout the Carlin Elementary Middle School in January, and Carlin’s Library Learning Commons was a hive of activity, as students focussed on coding and learning how to use Scratch Jr, Swift Playground, Ozobots (mini-robots) and Spheros (sphere robots).

For three weeks teacher-librarian Geri Ellis was joined by Jessa Clark, District Technology Helping Teacher, to help all students (kindergarten through grade 8) learn about coding.

Coding was added to the BC curriculum across all grades in 2016. Coding helps students learn to problem solve and develops resilience. It also gives students a way to expand their creativity and critical thinking skills.

“The students really enjoyed learning basic coding and were very engaged in their learning,” commented Ellis.

“The determination and stamina of the students was incredible as they worked through difficult challenges and debugging their code to find a correct solution,” added Clark.

The two worked with every class during their regularly scheduled library blocks, teaching them the basic skills required to code with that week’s technology. Students also had the opportunities to check-out books related to computer programming and work with the robotics that had been ordered in for this project.

Each Thursday and Friday, Clark was booked to work with classes using that week’s technology in a curricular way. 

“Not only did students gain familiarity with the technology, teachers were exposed to the many great technologies that are available from the District Resource Centre,” she explains.

“The best part of the time was integrating the technology with the curriculum. Students played Sphero subtraction darts and explored scale, perimeter and area using coding and robots.”

“Having the longer blocks on the Thursday and Friday let us dive directly and deeply into the learning since they’d already conquered the technical knowledge earlier during their library blocks.” 

Ellis noted that for students who would like to learn more coding on their own, they can visit the Carlin website for links to Hour of Code and Scratch Jr. and/or sign out new coding books in the library (if you are from another school check with your school’s teacher librarian)! Clark will also be returning to Carlin later this year to do a section on Minecraft Edu.