Lisa Dieker: [00:00:10] Welcome to practical access, I'm Lisa Dieker, and I am Rebecca Hines. [00:00:13][3.3]
Rebecca Hines: [00:00:14] And Lisa, I know today we get to talk about a topic that's fun for us, all our listeners, but we are we're kind of tech nerds in our own way. So Lisa, who are we talking to today? [00:00:26][11.6]
Lisa Dieker: [00:00:26] So we have a friend. I know that shocks you. We always say, everybody's our friend. No offense, Rachel. But we have with us today. Our friend, Dr. Rachel Hallet-Njuguna, who is going to be talking to us a little bit about her work with coding with little kids. I want to say over time, coding with little kids so. [00:00:46][19.8]
Rebecca Hines: [00:00:47] I can't wait to hear. Tell me how you got started with this topic in general. [00:00:50][3.6]
Dr. Rachel: [00:00:52] So in general, the school that I worked at, yes, I worked at Goldsboro Elementary Magnet School and Stanford is a stem magnet school. And so our sort of challenge is to find new and unique ways to bring STEM to our kids from kindergarten to fifth grade. So I was the Spacelab teacher, which is the best job ever, except for one, Dr. Decker, but is a very cool job because the kids would come to me and I had to find ways to build curriculum that would engage them in STEM and also in a space context. And so through that, I sort of started using drones and other devices that help them with the coding portion. Seminole County has a very strong push for coding in all grade levels, and so that was sort of all went together. [00:01:42][50.0]
Lisa Dieker: [00:01:43] I love it, so. Can you tell us a little bit about I think we're really fascinated with all of it, but I really would love to hear about how you help elementary teachers think about. And if you if I were a new elementary teacher, how I might get coding. And maybe this club format that you're doing into my school, my classroom and remember, you know, we got colleagues across the country, how might we spread these great ideas that you're doing across the country? [00:02:11][27.8]
Dr. Rachel Hallet-Njuguna: [00:02:12] Awesome. So my sort of push was to make it content based because we put so much on elementary teachers. I didn't want this to be one more thing. I wanted it to be a way to support content in a way for kids to access content in a way that was new and unique and different. So one of the ways that I talked to when I trained with the teachers that I worked with on using the drones, for example, was we talked about putting like vocabulary words on the floor. And then you give them a definition and the kids would have to fly the drone to the word and landed on it. It's just a new and unique way to do that. For me, I kicked it up a notch. We talk in fourth grade about things landing on Mars. And we talked about the distance that that that you can't immediately communicate with anything from Mars. And it takes about 15 minutes for anything to get there. And so that's when we learned about coding versus flying. They all want a remote control flight, but you can't remote control something and then send a signal 15 minutes away. So we talked about the logic in the sequence, and there's a lot of math involved in coding a robot knowing how far, how fast there were angles and was all kinds of great stuff. And so it's supported the math. They had to write out their plan and supported logical sequencing of events. And then the club was just sort of this extra awesome thing. That's the Orlando Science Center puts together, and they give little tasks for the kids to compete in. And one of them was an actual. It's I think it's called a bebop little robot. It looks like a bee. And they had to drive it through this path and our kids, because this is something they've been very proficient in for a while. They they said, we have to go down this path, they have to park it. And my little team of kindergartners were like, Can we park it backwards because we think we can do that? And so they were sure, and they added a couple extra lines of code to turn it around and then pull it in backwards. And so it's just a great sort of cross connection between math and literacy and then just the excitement of the technology because, [00:04:22][129.6]
Rebecca Hines: [00:04:23] well, you know. We all are wrapped up in the excitement of the technology, but not everybody. So, Rachel, tell me why it's important for young kids today to learn these types of skills. [00:04:36][13.6]
Dr. Rachel Hallet-Njuguna: [00:04:38] Great question, so we talked to the kids about just about every job now, how is going to have a technology component, whether it's just a computer or whether it's straight up coding and what we talk about them with is even as a teacher, learning how to navigate the technology helps me do my job better. It helps me not limit myself to. I can only use a marker on a whiteboard and I can get it helps me go out and find resources that are out there and understand it enough to be able to apply it. So we try to tell the kids we aren't. We don't know necessarily what the technology is going to look like in the future. But if you get comfortable with it, if it's something that you aren't afraid of, which again, I think our generation is the last sort of fear of technology because we did start off with it. The kids are they always laugh and I'm like, Yeah, I didn't have a cell phone till I was in college. The thing they were this big. And so I think we're getting to that point of our students are comfortable, whether they know how to use or not. They don't have that fear that we had. And so getting them to see all the different types opens up just so many opportunities for them. And then as teachers, it opens it up for us so that when something new and unique comes down, we're not afraid to try it. [00:05:53][74.8]
Lisa Dieker: [00:05:54] Yeah, it's funny because when you said cell phone, I was like, Oh yeah, I had a bag phone. I don't know if anybody else remembers a bag phone, but you carry it around and plugged it into your car. And you could call once if you were lucky. But you must have been rich and most of it rich. Yeah, that was it. I married Rich. So yeah. Anyway, so my husband's name says a good life for you. But anyway, you know, I love that concept that you said about fear because I think that same concept of fear happens to of of allowing some students with disabilities. I mean, when you said kindergarten, I was like, Oh yeah, let's take kindergartners. And, you know, we had a doc student here. His dissertation was focused on teaching kindergartners to program with Down Syndrome using robots. And so talk to me about how in this club or in your work in the lab, not only have you been inclusive, but how do you help teachers when there's this? I don't think you mean that kid. What's been your approach to that in the work that you've been doing? [00:06:49][55.5]
Dr. Rachel Hallet-Njuguna: [00:06:50] So mine, I have tried because the best part was the the students with disabilities would come with a peer group, so they would always come to me embedded with a larger group and I had the best fun mixing them up and giving them that opportunity to kind of show their strength. And a lot of times the creative technology hands on pieces. That's where they shine, because a lot of my I always say, I know my gifted kids because they would get stuck in trying to make it perfect. But then my other kids were so creative and so out of the box thinking that they would just jump right in and end up being more successful because they didn't have that initial. OK, I've got to it's got to be perfect right away. They're like, Oh, this is new. Let me just try this. So I used to love, especially the young ones, giving them things like the little and a lot now is so touch based and visual. The one that we used was tinker and tinker. The programing, you just literally drag it over and it says the go forward and you dragged over, go forward. And so it made it more accessible. It wasn't like coding language, and they didn't have to type in complex sequencing. And I know there are others out there that have like a nice picture base, so it's not limited by their reading level. It's not limited by comprehension. They can really go at it. And so, yeah, the teachers luckily would come with their class to my room and they would get to see it. And that was some of the most eye opening for them is because there were kids that they were afraid to give things or afraid to try things with, and they would see it happen in my lab. And then they would get, Oh, well, OK, we can do that then because they're doing it here. [00:08:33][102.8]
Rebecca Hines: [00:08:34] Well, Rachel, I'm going to I'm going to give my final question because we are practical access, can do you have some specific resources you can share with us? Maybe, yes, maybe a simple curriculum. Is there something that's a go to for me as a teacher? If I'm maybe fearful, but I'm ready to try it or I'm willing to try doing some coding with elementary aged kids? Where do I start? [00:09:00][25.9]
Dr. Rachel Hallet-Njuguna: [00:09:01] So coding is, I mean, Tinker is my favorite go to. It's got lots of free. There is some paper, but there's lots and lots and lots. They have daily like sample lessons and they can be downloaded on to any iPad for free. That's where I started. I was not a coding person. I actually, when I was working at the district office, I started with something called Jupyter Notebooks, which is like true coding. I would not go there. That's a little overwhelming, but Tinker is really good. I know our school also uses code.org, which is another really cool, free resource that's meant for young kids. And so they they have like really cute characters and like the ones that we used and tinker have like a little alien that had a hop over like rocks and had to make it back to a ship. And they're really, like, just very engaging. And like I said, a lot of drag and drop, a lot of touch, a lot of real visual things that can happen. And I would recommend as a teacher drawing it out first and then making sure you know what to do, because that's what I have to do. I was like, I got that drone in my hand. I said, I have no idea what I'm doing, but went through and kind of learned what the different. There's like 12 sets of instructions really needed the one. So I was like, Let me learn that one and try not to do everything. All the curriculum I used, I made for me, but it's it's nothing that can't be done by any teacher just taking the tool and thinking, how can I adjust this to make it fit my needs? But like I said, those two code.org and tinker would be the two that I would go to that I use the most as far as very accessible and very easy to use. For those of us that are not coding experts. [00:10:48][106.9]
Lisa Dieker: [00:10:49] Well, my last question for you is kind of taking the practical approach in a different way. But I'm a parent. I don't have technology in my home. I don't like technology. I don't even know what to do with it. And I have a kindergartner who's a struggling learner. Where how could I do coding without needing teaching the skills of coding, without needing to go, spend a lot of money and try to retrain myself because I'm busy and I'm working full time? Where where do I start as a parent if maybe I have more limited options? [00:11:22][32.7]
Dr. Rachel Hallet-Njuguna: [00:11:23] So super great question. And this goes along kind of with what Seminole County the district has been trying to do, but getting the kids to see that coding is really a sequence is really coming up with directions in a particular sequence with sufficient detail so that the thing you're coding will do what you want it to do. And so and this is an activity that's been around forever. But like that whole, tell me how to make a peanut butter sandwich activity that teachers have used it forever. And so the kids will say, put the peanut butter on bread and you put the whole jar of peanut butter onto the piece of bread. So simple things like that. As a parent say, I need to do this task. I need to mow the lawn today. Can you tell me what are the steps I should do? How fast should I drive? Or how long do you think it'll take or have them? It could be literally doing the dishes. How fast should I go? How many plates do you think will fit in there and have the kids kind of write out the instructions? And then you, as a parent, follow them and just get them to see the the the concept of sequencing the concepts of the timing, the math that's involved, and it allows you to sort of interact without there being any technology involved at all. [00:12:36][73.2]
Lisa Dieker: [00:12:37] I love that idea. I'm going to flip it, though. I think the kid writes directions and the kid mows the lawn and does the dishes to be even better. Show me your home now. Yeah. Now that you've written it now, can you please show it to me? Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing those great, wonderful, practical ideas. And if you have questions for us, please send them to our Facebook page or you can send us a tweet at Access Practical. Thank you again, Rachael, for joining us. Thank you. [00:13:02][25.0]
Dr. Rachel Hallet-Njuguna: [00:13:02] Thank you for having me. [00:13:02][0.0]
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