Breaking down the Coding Barriers for our Teachers

Coding has become an area of the curriculum that haunts many teachers. The worry of how to teach the children something that they know nothing about can often become a huge barrier. So how do we make this easier?

There are many resources out there that can support coding, but I believe that primary school teachers need to take a step back and ask the question "Why are we teaching coding?". Once we know this answer, we can approach coding in a much more simplistic way. So, why are we teaching coding? What we are not doing is trying to create a classroom of App developers or Game developers. Although there may be one or two students that get inspired and head down that path! What we are doing is challenging the students with problem solving, critical thinking, patient, resilience, understanding failure, we are encouraging them the think outside the box and develop the creative thinking skills to solve problems. So let's take a step back and explore this.

I teach computing skills from Nursery years upwards. I find it fascinating how young children adapt to problem solving very quickly. Terminology sometimes becomes a barrier for teachers, I mean, what on earth is an algorithm? In simple terms "A set of instructions to solve a problem". In nursery I have a gorilla and his name is Al! </