INTRODUCTION

• It's easy to teach coding and making to Elementary School kids in a way that is fun and prepares them for success in future technology classes and careers.

• The coding & making course below contains blocks called units that teach a specific set of skills in a certain sequence.

• At the end of each unit there is usually an assessment activity which kids do so we can see what they learned.

• The videos in the units can be paused at any time to give students time to code and make.

• We like projects that build on previous projects because this teaches kids to improve or 'iterate' their designs.

• We also like to solve problems using 'decomposition' which just means breaking problems down into smaller, solve-able problems, which is an otherwise useful life skill.

• A premium is placed on fun. If the activity is fun, and kids look back at their finished project with a sense of joy, not only will they keep coding and making, they will get the concepts too.

• We avoid throwing around big names such as computational thinking (coding) or design thinking (making) because kids don't know what they mean and quite frankly most adults, including me, don't either.

• I worked and coded for 20 years in 5 different tech startups. I've also taught coding & design at all grade levels in high school including AP Computer Science. The coding and making concepts taught in this course are the same no matter whether the student is 7 years old or 18 years old and will serve them in very good stead if they work in tech because they learned the concepts when they were young.

Units