Hadi PartoviVerified account

When did we collectively decide coding for kids should just be moving cartoon characters through mazes? Is there any empirical evidence this activity is useful for helping kids do interesting and personally meaningful things with code? If there is, please point me to it #CSforAll

I’m not sure anybody ever decided CS should be limited to just puzzles or mazes. Why limit students’ learning to any single approach?

There are tools or activities that limit students to a single coding approach. If so, we should let them use multiple tools, and help them learn that CS is more than coding.

At @codeorg our curriculum mixes puzzles, open-ended sandboxes, non-coding widgets, short videos, unplugged lessons, etc, with a balance of student-guided and teacher-guided activities.

2 datapoints on the benefit of including puzzles to engage students in a variety of CS activities:

1) Pre/post testing shows: 1 hour of puzzle-based coding => significant improvement in student attitudes and self-efficacy re CS, esp among high school girls. https://code.org/files/HourOfCodeImpactStudy_Jan2017.pdf …

2) Students have created 56M projects on @codeorg, applying skills learned via puzzles to open sandboxes (logo-style art, block-based games, javascript apps)

I’d encourage any CS educator or student who is only familiar with one single-modality coding tool to spread their wings a little and explore. There are many great approaches, and we all have room to grow/learn.