iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Countless articles and blogs are being written on a daily basis pushing back on the coding movement suggesting “not all kids will be professional coders!”

Totally!
But that isn’t why we teach certain subjects. As a phys ed teacher, I don’t anticipate every student playing in the NBA (but I don’t discourage it either!). A well rounded approach to education is the best fit and by today’s standards, coding should be included.

Technology has become vital to our day-to-day lives and critical in the K-12 classroom. In a tech-saturated market, parents of our students have raised questions about how artificial intelligence (AI) will impact their future careers.

Whether you believe AI has potential to meet or surpass human intelligence, it is imperative that we equip students with skills to match the nearing demands of the future workplace. Computational thinking (CT) is the latest skill set that addresses the demands of the future workplace. CT enables us to analyze and process data algorithmically, and often visually. CT offers a process for problem-solving, where one develops a series of steps (an algorithm) to solve open-ended problems. Put simply, it’s a framework to approach problems like a computer would: by processing data in a well-defined series of steps.