Coding Class at the Zaha Building
We are so grateful to our friends and partners at the Zaha Hadid Building for allowing us a space to provide a coding class specifically for students at Avenues The World School. This particular group of kids has been learning coding with GIANT for three years, and we’ve been learning and growing our coding curriculum along with them!
The class consists of three eight year olds and one five year old. These eight year olds have experience with platforms such as Scratch, CoSpaces, MicroBits, and so much more! This year they will be taking a big step in their coding journey and will start learning Python.
The instructor leading the class, and also writing all of the curriculum is Hong Hua. Hua has an extensive background in Fine Arts, Design and Technology with a Masters degree in design and technology from Parsons School of Design.
“My goal is for students to walk through a complete game building process from designing the aesthetics to developments, which integrates their prior programming knowledge to a more systematic level.”
The class began on Monday, October 30th, so it is still relatively new. So far, they have been working on learning the MDA model, which is an essential part of game theory that covers mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. In particular, they’ve been working on building their own target games, something that Hua picked up as being one of their favorite types of games.
Hua says of the older students: “They understand the different functions of the code block quite well, and are capable of building a basic interactive game by themselves. I noticed that they have great interests in achieving goals/levels in games, and are amazed by different types of game interaction mechanics (like multiplayers or adventure), and they were eager to make their own version that they can share with their friends.”
However, when GIANT kids learn coding, their eyes aren’t simply glued to a computer screen the entire time. When it comes to creating games and learning about different coding languages and structures, interact with real life materials and each other to do some collaborative prototyping before translating everything to code.
This class is no different, Hua has observed that these coders love to collaborate and provide each other with feedback: “I want to highlight that my students were starting to help each other with coding and design. I think this is a very effective way of reinforcing knowledge, and really contributes to the classroom atmosphere a lot.”
The one five year old receives a lot of help and feedback from her older classmates as she learns Scratch for the first time. Right now she is learning how to animate text using code.
We are so excited to see the amazing games and designs this group creates as the class progresses!
If you are interested to learn more about our coding programs, bring GIANT to your school, or request for a private coding workshop series, send us an email here.
Animation of the student’s and her best friend’s names!