I Teach Coding for Kids in a Year
Let’s take a short history class on why I became so obsessed to blend Early Childhood education with the digital/tech industry…
It all started when I enrolled myself in Vocational High School in East Jakarta. Yes, the infamous SMK N 48 Jakarta, and I was their Multimedia major student. Graduating from vocation school was not quite a deal-breaker for their alumni to continue their studies in higher education. Most of my classmates went straight to the industry or continue for 1–2 years of diploma before eventually practicing in their field as well. At first, I thought I really want to be a Graphic Designer. But, the thing is, I can’t stand the bankruptcy I experienced during my Visual Design major at university. Those assignments ripped off my wallet so bad, that I had to resign. Lol
So I quit. For good.
…and here I am now 7 years later. An educational background graduate who realized that I am still really into everything about design and technology.
The journey began in Koding Next
Way before I work in Koding Next, I already had a dilemma in the Digital Marketing industry. I love the job, the process, and those campaign innuendos but somehow, I didn’t see myself committed to this digital-marketing field for the future. It was a nice knowledge I had, but not a thing I would do forever.
So when the resignation letter had already been issued to my HR, I took a few weeks to think of what median should I go next. What kind of career path I’d like to take in order to realize my passion for technology and education.
I remember I love creating digital tools for early learners. My undergraduate thesis was about Manta Rays AR Storybook. Not to mention, The Sex-Education story-based apps I created for Outstanding Student Selection (Pilmapres) in my faculty won third place and 2nd place as well in the ECE competition at Universitas Negeri Semarang back in 2018.
Game, Digital Media, Design, and Early Childhood Education are my 4 main expertise. My Ikigai.
And that’s when I grew interested in the digital education field.
In Koding Next, I’m posted to teach Little Koders (4–8 y.o) and Junior Koders (8–12 y.o) classes. But most of the time, I engage more with Little Koders classes, since that’s the area of my pedagogy expertise.
If you were about to ask me “Do you know something about coding?”
or… “so, can you code?”
My sincerest answer would be “If you think HTML5 was a programming language, then I knew bits of it”
tee-hee.
In fact, during my first employment in Koding Next, I had 0 skills in coding at all costs. Yet, the Koding Next team facilitate me to grow my understanding, skills, and knowledge to learn about programming and coding as educational matters. The training and curriculum team taught me both: visual and textual programming. I was beyond excited because I’m not only working as a teacher here but also gaining fresh knowledge I didn’t get during my university years. For me, all the knowledge I got from working in Koding Next, has opened my mind to develop and teach digital tools for everything. I learn how to create a game with Scratch, how to script using LUA in Roblox, how to make mobile apps in Thunkable, etc.
What does coding look like for Early Learners?👾
In Koding Next, I learn the best way to teach coding to kids is by implementing “Project Based Learning”. As we know, Project Based Learning (PBL) is a teaching method in which students learn by actively engaging and creating meaningful projects. So the learning process is not letting them sit all the time, listening to lectures one way and hoping that they would understand concepts around programming itself. Instead, as a teacher, we give them different kinds of projects each week and let them try to create their own, based on what concepts we have learned that day.
During my first year working in Koding Next, I realized that apparently, we teach the kids basic logic lessons. Something we used to learn in preschools like shapes, pattern recognition, repetition, sequencing, and lots of concepts that actually are a foundation of CODING. Those are not a mere novelty.
As a teacher, we have to grasp a strong knowledge of each concept taught to kids. Because a solid conceptual knowledge will make us easier to explain in 5 years old acceptable language, especially when we try to teach coding to them. You didn’t want to explain a variable concept to preschool children with superficial connotations which just made them ignore you. Or teach them how to find a Bayesian pattern with stuff that does not involve play activity.
Believe me, I’ve tried 🤫
Anyway, besides fundamental concepts, there’s a need to integrate it with digital tools or learning media which support the coding activity itself. This is what we lacked in resources and skills as a teacher in Indonesia nowadays. While our kids are speeding up with their digital natives' era, there are some teachers who might be still trying to know how to share screens in Zoom or create simple games in Kahoot.
Oh, don’t forget the love-hate relationship we have with Worksheet in preschool settings 😂
As preschool teachers, we know “Play” has an important role to develop the cognitive skills of our kids. But the fact is, we need to question ourselves again: “Are we already serving the children a play activity they need, not what we wanted?”
Besides the play aspects which we need to rethink and remodel, we also have homework on how to address how in today’s rapidly-changing world, young students must learn to think and act creatively. We heard a lot of jargon like “be creative, think creative, act creatively”. But what is creativity means to our future generation? How could we cultivate creative thinkers if the setting of the play and learning itself are still directed one way from a teacher in the classroom?
How to shape our kids not as users of technology but as creators as well?🤳🧠
It’s not a peculiar view anymore to see children play around with Roblox, Minecraft, and even TikTok. Their abilities to adapt to new platform digitally has blown adults’ mind. Well, my question to this: is it enough to let our children be the user and not nurture them as a creator? I’ve read an article from Prof. Mitchel Resnick — a researcher from Lifelong Kindergarten at the MIT Media Lab — to engage young people in creative learning experiences so that they can develop as creative thinkers. Their approach is based on four core elements, called the Four P’s of Creative Learning:
Projects
Prof. Resnick said that children learn best when they are actively working on meaningful projects. Because, during the projects, they are generating new ideas, designing prototypes, and refining through the feedback. Projects give them a sense of creating something so they are actively seeking the solution to a problem. Pro tips: project is not always about a complicated or fantastic idea to work on, it could start as a simple one with minimum accomplishment since the projects will actively gain input from peers and refine later.
Peers
While kids learn something, they also develop their social activities with peers like sharing ideas, collaborating on projects, and building on one another’s work. Pay attention to your kids while they are playing with lego or blocks, for example. While the kids are busy tinkering with their models whether they do it individually or in a group, there might be other kids around who express their opinion and give feedback on others’ work from their perspectives. This phenomenon could be led by teachers to help those children actively engage in brainstorming sessions so they could find a better solution together.
Passion
Have you ever noticed when your children are passionate about something, they work longer and harder, persist in the face of challenges, and learn more? That’s what passion does to your children in the learning process.
As an adult or teacher, we have to guide and also serve them a subject, topic, or project when they work on that, they’ll work it out passionately.
Play
We probably heard it a million times as a preschool teacher: “Children learn through/while/during the play session”.
From Prof. Resnick's perspective, learning involves playful experimentation — trying new things, tinkering with materials, testing boundaries, taking risks, and iterating again and again. People in his research group think about play, they think of play as an attitude and an approach to engaging with the world. They see play as a process of tinkering, experimenting and exploring.
. . .
Well, from everything I’ve said I know that there are still a lot of holes we need to address on how to integrate ICT in the early childhood learning process and also remodel the concept of coding learning in preschool settings. This is work I need to do, and I planned to build it during my Master's study.
Please pray the best for my grad school applications! Bismillah…
— Jakarta, 19 July 2022
وَ السَّلاَمُ عَلَيْكُمْ وَرَحْمَةُ اللهِ وَبَرَكَاتُهُ
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