Coding in the Genius Hour Classroom: Discovering a New Passion

At Millwood Junior School, our JK-Grade 5 students participate in Genius Hour once per week.  For many students this is an opportunity to further explore existing passions and learn valuable technology, inquiry, communication and collaboration skills along the way.  For many students, however, Genius Hour has become a place where they discover passions for things they never knew about before.  Part of the Genius Hour process is for students to share the learning with one another.  Students are exposed to a wide variety of topics in this manner and when one piques their interest, they are able to chose that topic for their next inquiry.

Genius Hour is all about choice, but from time to time, students are given a little extra encouragement to try specific new things to see how they feel about them. Coding (computer programming) is such an important skill to have in the workforce today and it is expected that the need for people with an understanding of coding is going to continue to grow into the foreseeable future, so some time is devoted in our Genius Hour program to exposing our students to Hour of Code activities on websites like https://lightbot.com/ and https://code.org/ .  On these sites, students can learn the logic of coding with age appropriate tasks using block code.  Then, should they discover that coding is their new passion, they can choose to use Genius Hour time to go beyond the Hour of Code to explore various enrichment activities on these and other learn-to-code sites throughout the year.

Kindergarten Students learning to code with Lightbot