InfoTeacher

One other seminar I attended at the TIE conference was on an instructional programming language called Python. It looks a lot like the old BASIC language which I’ve been intending to re-acquaint myself with and use with some G/T math kids (hate to keep returning to just G/T kids, but my G/T teacher is open to almost any new thing, and she already does things with kids that may apply to things I’d like to do with kids. If not G/T, then perhaps some 4th or 5th grade kids could “skip” math a couple days per week to do Python with me.) Python gets kids thinking about math — they engage themselves in meta-cognition because they have to think about how a simple math concept is done so they can program the computer to do it. Rather than returning to BASIC (now “Visual” BASIC and different than when I learned it in the ’80s), Python is simple and English based so the kids can think about how to program (and do the math and logic), but the seminar I attended already has many of the lessons prepared for me to teach with kids!  The benefits are that kids engage in higher level thinking as the debug their programs and think about logic and math concepts in a new — detached — manner of thinking. I see many benefits for students. Python is a powerful language with simple possibilities that can make learning fun.

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