ELN302 - Week Seven Coding and Programming
Optional Recommended Reading
Mitch Resnick TED Talk
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a global set of conferences which are designed to inform people of new ideas. This TED talk features Mitchell Resnick, the creator of Scratch at MIT. In this TED talk, Resnick tells an anecdote of how he wanted to make a Mother's Day card for his mother using the Scratch software. Instead, he found numerous examples of Mother's Day cards created by other people shared onto the site. This is a fantastic example of a simple lesson plan that could be incorporated into classrooms using coding and programming.
Resnick discusses that the younger generation of today are referred to as "Digital Natives", however he states his disagreement with this label. He believes that while the younger generation spend a lot of time using technology (texting, Facebooking, websurfing, gaming etc.) they are not able to create new content. Hence why coding is a necessity to teach in schools, he makes the comparison that in a sense it is like reading but not knowing how to write.
This is a beneficial talk to view, as it provides the viewer with an insight to the benefits and innate need to learn to code.