K12 students code beyond computers | District Administration Magazine - 0 views
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John Evans on 21 May 18"How do you ensure students who excel at math remain engaged? Heidi Williams intended to solve that challenge by starting an after-school coding club while she was a gifted-and-talented teacher at Bayside Middle School near Milwaukee. Instead of using pen and paper, her students created an interactive children's book on Scratch, the MIT Media Lab coding suite that lets users create games, stories and simulations. And the more of this kind of coding activity they did, the better their math test scores got. Now a computer science curriculum specialist at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Williams researches this correlation. One possibility is that the computational thinking skills developed while coding help students break down complicated problems-on and off computers, she says."