A Delightful Way to Teach Kids About Computers – TED Talk
“I was a programmer, but no one knew it.” “No one recognized that when I was conjugating French irregular verbs, I was actually practicing my pattern recognition skills. And when I was excited about knitting, I actually was following a sequence of symbolic commands that included loops inside of them.” This TED Talk by Linda Liukas is well worth a watch.
Hour of Code
Next week is Hour of Code and Code.org has everything you need! There are some of your favourite activities from previous years and this year’s new coding activity is a dance party. You can sort activities by device type, age levels, length of time and more.
Thinking in Patterns
Pattern recognition is crucial in computational thinking and this article explores what pattern recognition is, how it can be applied in the classroom and other resources to support students and teachers. For younger students there is also this article about pattern matching puzzles.