Adebimbola Ogunyale

When I wasn’t writing and testing code of my own, I would either be at Howard University Middle School or Georgetown Day School teaching other kids how to code. Two of the tools that I have been using to teach the fundamentals of programming are App Inventor and Scratch. Each of which were developed at MIT. Students ranging from PK-8 grade are either learning Scratch Jr, Scratch or App Inventor. Each of these tools are very similar as they group code into blocks that is easily combined with a drag and drop interface.

I’ve found it interesting how fast a preK/Kindergartener can pick up basic concepts at such a young age. For example, some of the students are able to think of an idea, say how they will do it, then put the blocks together to run their code and confirm their theory. Some students were able to grasps basic programming concepts well enough to advance to writing actual code(HTML, CSS, Javascript).