Flipped Classroom and Coding with Matteo DiMuro

In this weeks blog post for my Internet for Educators course, I will be focusing on the presentation given to us by Matteo DiMuro, a high school math and computer science teacher from Brandon. His presentation focused on coding, but also had touched on flipped classroom at the beginning of his presentation.

Flipped Classroom

Before Matteo really got into his presentation, he asked how many of us were familiar with flipped classroom. I felt like I had a pretty good idea, but I didn't want to put my hand up in case I was confusing it with something else. Turns out I wasn't the only one, since very few people had their hands up. I knew it was student-led, but I couldn't quite remember the process of flipping a classroom. 

Flipped classroom is when students consume and practice material outside of class time, so when students come to class they can be getting individual help from the teacher or working on a lab. By freeing up instruction time from lectures, more time can be spent on troubleshooting problems with students. Matteo also recommended uploading lecture videos on YouTube, so students can revisit the lecture when completing work outside of class.

As with everything, there are pros and cons. Flipped classroom allows for student centered learning, makes content more accessible (parents can also follow along), but flipped classroom settings can also create a digital divide (no one wants to be the one person without a computer at home), and it relies on students actually doing the work at home. 

Educators don't have to go "all in" on flipped classroom - can even consider flipping the classroom once every few weeks, or just for one entire week. Especially in scenarios where there are strict material deadlines (ex. Manitoba math provincial exams have strict timelines for teaching material), but teachers or students want to explore something that may require more of a lab set-up. By flipping the classroom for one week, having students watch lecture at home or learn on their own, it frees up classroom time for labs while they are still on track for their exam.

I am interested in the idea of flipped classroom, but unsure how it relates to my scenario. I would say that the music class is usually a 'lab' period where students are working, rather than me lecturing or talking (of course, all depends on the day!). I would say my version of "flipped classroom" would be more like homework. Yes, we could listen to a specific recording at home to free up some class time, but I'm not sure where the line is between homework and flipped classroom. It gives students theoretically more time to play instruments, but I think I would do that anyway without a flipped classroom model. I am really interested in uploading lessons to YouTube, however! I think that could be super helpful for students. Even if it is a recording of me performing a piece for them, so when they go home to practice they can hear how it is supposed to sound. I did something similar in my ICT class last year with a recorder demo! I think I would restructure it differently now (like showing the notation on the screen, somehow), but I think this type of idea would be great to include on a teacher website that students and parents could access.

Coding

After talking about flipped classroom, Matteo shifted his focus to coding. We talked about this article from the UK talking about their coding programming for schools. It was neat to see what they are teaching in other countries about coding, and how they teach coding to the different age ranges.

Matteo stressed that teaching coding wasn't that everyone will grow up to become a computer scientist or expert coder, but rather to teach skills that is useful for daily life (oddly enough, a lot like music). Concepts like algorithms, patterns, and decomposition all play a role in coding but are useful in life as well. Coding approaches like creating, debugging (finding and fixing errors), and collaborating are all great things to practice in coding but useful in other areas of life. To practice these things are to be computational thinkers. See the infographic below for more information!

Matteo showed us a platform called Scratch that can be used to introduce students to coding. Scratch is a community with games, and interactive stories created by coding! In class, we made a racetrack with two moving vehicles. We had to code where the car would start, how it would move when what button was pushed, what would happen if the car touched outside of the track, among other things. It's easy to forget all the directions one would need to make the game work correctly. For example, when I ran my race for the first time, and I won, my vehicle disappeared. But I forgot to tell the computer that I wanted the vehicle to re-appear when I started a new race. It's the small things that count!

In one of my student teaching placements, I spent an afternoon with the school teacher-librarian teaching coding to a split class of Grade's 3 and 4. He used the Hour of Code Dance Party platform. I found it ran similarly, almost identical to Scratch. The working screen is very similar, and the way the commands are phrased is also very similar. This was the student's first introduction to coding, so it was interesting to see how they would pick it up. Some students (I would say most) really took to coding in this way, especially with all the familiar ("meme") dance moves and songs programmed into the game. I think I liked Dance Party over Scratch because I found the tutorial in Dance Party really easy to follow. Scratch was likely more difficult because we skipped over the tutorial, and maybe I would have liked it better had I done the tutorial and felt more comfortable. 

Thanks for reading!