Weekly Reflection – Topic 8

Hi everyone! I thought today was quite a fun class! I am terrible at coding and know almost nothing about computers, but the block coding I found super useful because it simplified it so much. While we had lab time in class, I chose to explore the flappy bird coding activity because I LOVE flappy bird. I used to play it so often in middle and high school on my phone, so I thought it would be super fun to create my own game using the coding blocks! (I also had a lot of fun playing it after I made the game) The link to the coding website popped up with a tutorial right away, which I downloaded and attached below so that anyone can use it if they want. The tutorial was very helpful and explained everything I had to do to create my own flappy bird game.

Here is a screencast of my flappy bird game! Unfortunately, I forgot to share my computer audio to zoom before I recorded this so you can’t hear all of the sounds in the game but they are there!

Now, I wanted to discuss coding and computational thinking in the context of my subject, which is chemistry and general science. As we saw in our pre-class video to watch, computational thinking is simply a problem solving skill involving logical and critical thinking. It is about looking at a problem and solving it systematically and efficiently. Isn’t that one of the main goals we have for students in high school?! We want them to be able to go out into the world and thinking critically and logically about everything around them! Computational thinking in the context of my subject is extremely important because we do not want students to simply memorize science, we want them to be able to look at a problem and solve it critically to create a real, conceptual understanding of the subject. Coding is something that would not be a required skill but could be incorporated to make some science more fun. Just as I created that flappy bird game, we could get students to code their own math or chemistry games that could involve formulas or chemical symbols. I think coding is not something that would be able to be incorporated into upper level chemistry classes very often, but if you wanted a fun class to break up a long week of heavy material, this could be a really good way to do it. On the other hand of having coding being for “fun”, you could also do a coding class that would help prepare students for university. This would be a very basic class that would just give students a little bit of background information before they potentially go to university. Many classes in university like biology, chemistry, or microbiology labs, or statistics classes involve some form coding. Most students have never touched coding before university, so incorporating a few small classes could be very beneficial to them and put them ahead in class.

The last thing I wanted to discuss today is gaming in relation to my subject areas. Games are a fantastic way to break up long classes or long weeks of heavy material, as I said above. However, in the chemistry 11 or 12 sense, we have to be very careful about games. This is because there is a lot of content we have to cover that is very important for students to know going into university, so if we are doing a game, we need to ensure that it is all about chemistry and will help the students learn, or it is just to fill extra time because we have already gotten everything else done. In the context of science 10, however, I think it can be very useful. A lot of kids in those classes do not actually want to be there, they are there because it is a required course for them so any way to make it more engaging is super awesome. In the biology unit, you could play some sort of terminology naming game with different species or you could play jeopardy as a midterm review. Things like Kahoot, Blook-it, or Gimkit are also really easy trivia style games that can just be run through students using their phones. I think it is important to incorporate fun things into science 9 or 10 so that students do not lose interest around science.