Weekly Reflection: Computational Thinking & Gaming in Education

Here is a screenshot of myself working on the Elsa and Anna from Frozen in class coding activity. To be fully honest and transparent I found myself a bit confused while working on the coding activity as I have very limited coding knowledge. However, I found it fun and was beginning to pick up on it as we reached the end of the activity time and loved the gamification of coding!

Critically reflect on Coding & Computation thinking in the context of the subject you will be teaching.

To be fully honest I believe that it will be a bit harder to implement coding and computation in the context of my subjects of PHE and Social Studies in comparison to perhaps subjects of math and sciences. However, this prompted be to look into how you might be able to implement coding and computation into social studies. I came across this article here which documents how one can implement coding into a social studies lesson. A highlight of the article is that it mentioned the multimodal tool of Twine. This stood out to me as this was a tool I worked with last semester in my Multiliteracies class and once I saw this example it helped me understand how I might be able to implement cross curricular strategies of computer science and social studies into my teaching practices/pedagogy. I will continue to explore other tools I can use within social studies to incorporate coding.

Critically reflect on gaming in the context of the subject you will be teaching.

I am a strong believer of using games while learning, in particular due to one of my teachable being PHE. As a result, I really want to use student centered learning during my teaching of social studies as I believe for one it suits my teaching style better, but as well I believe my students will get more out of it. Of course as mentioned during class today, games cannot be all that we do in class, however, it is an excellent way to promote student engagement. I believe for a class such as social studies where sometimes content can become dry at times, using the strategy of games help create more fun and engaging lessons. Some of the ways I intend to make my lessons more engaging during social studies lessons are through the use of kahoot! and as well Gimkit. I will continue to explore and look for more strategies to gamify the subject of social studies. I think without using technology, a lot of games or strategies used to teach games in PHE can be modified and made applicable to using in social studies to help gamify the lesson. Either way, I believe that games that use technology or those that do not are both equally effective strategies to use!