Visibility of eTwinning Projects Groups July 2019 Newsletter Newsletter 9 | Page 26

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2019 Newsletter
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are all lifelong learners and always share our
knowledge. It is really teamwork across the borders
for getting better every day.
Link to the TwinSpace of the eTwinning project:
https://twinspace.etwinning.net/76769/home.
Heidi Giese is a German eTwinning ambassador and a
teacher of French and Social Science/History/Geography
at Anne-Frank-Schule, Europaschule, in Eschwege,
Germany. She is a lifelong learner, interested in all kinds
of pedagogy helping students to succeed, be motivated
and not be left behind.
Coding – first steps for young students
by Florentina Păduraru
Living in a digital era, coding for young
schoolchildren has become important, just like
learning to read or to count. Anyone (absolutely
anyone) can learn to code. What is coding? Coding
means giving a computer some instructions, in a
language that it understands, to do some specific
actions. Coding is important for young students
because it teaches them how to solve problems, to
be resilient, persistent, determined.
A good, simple and fun way to teach coding to
primary school students is the treasure hunt. They
must follow some steps (3 giant steps left, 2 frog
jumps forward, 5 small steps right etc) to get to the
treasure. This way, students learn the concept of
algorithm – a set of steps to follow to get from one
point to another – basic information when trying to
code. Solving mazes (blindfolded or not) also
teaches students that they need to follow specific
steps to get where they want.
Story sequence helps students to learn about
sequencing, another concept in coding. A story will
be broken into pictures and students will arrange
them in a logical order. Solving puzzles is a lot like
story sequence, only that an image is broken into
many smaller pieces that children must put back
together. Through play they learn to solve
problems, a good quality when coding.
All children love building stuff, especially houses
and cars. Using the building blocks students can
build what they like, but also create dominoes. With
these simple ideas young students learn about
cause and effect, about logical thinking, qualities
useful for coding and for life, in general. With Lego
sets (especially building blocks) they learn about
following instructions, then building their own ones.
All of these activities can be organized at school,
but also at home. The following ideas I used with
my second class students in an eTwinning project
“First step to coding”, a project that was nominated
last year in Romania as the best eTwinning project
for the creative use of technology. This project is
prepared for the students aged between 4 and 11
to take the first steps in coding and to enable them
to be ready for a higher level of coding education.
Firstly, the teachers participated in "First Step To
Coding With Code.org" course. Students designed
their projects through the end of the process of the
project.
The main objectives were: to increase the
knowledge and skills of teachers and the students
about coding, to increase the digital literacy skills,
to enable learning environment through playing, to
integrate the technology into education, to develop
designing skills, to have a communication and
cooperation among with different project partners,
to get the realization of cultural exchange, to
improve foreign language skills, to share and
disseminate the activities and project outputs in
various ways in some portals such as teacher,
student, parent and education portals.
The results of the project were: students were
informed about coding and they gained a realization
about coding by preparing the infrastructure and
they also gained skills such as problem solving,
cooperation, algorithmic thinking and design. They
were taught basic programming terms and
principles and were encouraged to make their own
designs. They were also capable of using the
technology more effectively and appropriately, and
communication, cooperation and sharing among
partner schools were ensured. All work and
activities of the project were shared on various
platforms, such as website, e-magazine, online
events.
One of the most interesting activities was “Move the
Flurbs”, when the students had to show the
shortest road for Flurb to get to the apple. They did
that by cutting out arrows and gluing them to form
a path for the Flurb to follow. Another successful
activity was to learn how to dance using codes –
“Move it Map”. Each move got a name: South,
North, West, East, Stop, Rest. By combining them,
the students learnt a few simple dance steps and
they were delighted. They also learned about
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