There are numerous platforms in the market that help you learn how to code, but what do they teach you and in which format? When you research what’s out there, you can be overwhelmed by all the options available. Most websites take on the approach of customization, drawing you in with promises of teaching you how to create your own world, a game, or any app that you desire.
The problem with this format is if you don’t know where to begin, you will need a lot of guidance before you can get anywhere. Don’t get me wrong, customization is a great method, but it’s important to build a foundation of coding knowledge before you jump into anything.
RoboGarden is a simple and intuitive way to learn how to code. This platform shows a clear understanding and accommodation to the K-12 education model. Each course, also known as a journey, is designed with school learning outcomes in mind and takes the student age into consideration. Journeys are built to contain stories that take place in an immersive world complete with interactive graphics and visualizations. The course outcomes are distributed throughout the journey through adventures. Think of adventures as lessons. Each adventure contains a tutorial, a tutorial quiz, five missions that focus on a coding concept that will increase in difficulty, and a quiz at the end that measures the student’s understanding of the concept before moving on to the next one.
The progression of learning becomes more complex and challenging as you move forward. But, what truly sets RoboGarden apart from other competitors is how the platform provides a smooth transition from Blockly to the textual languages, Python and JavaScript. Student begin with visual drag and drop programming and then progresses into scripting languages while solving fun and engaging programming challenges. The first transition replaces blocks with the equivalent code, and then asks questions about each block. This process is repeated until the student feels confident about the syntax of the newly learned language.
In later journeys, the student is required to write sections of the code to complete the specific mission. And eventually, they will have to write out the whole code in either Python or JavaScript. Through this process, the student grows their confidence while progressing from a beginner to an intermediate level coder.
NGSS is a standard of education that is used as a basis for all RoboGarden journeys. It focus on thinking like an engineer and innovation. As the student advances through the journey, they learn to think like a scientist. RoboGarden is a leader in mixing computer science with engineering and scientific thought processes.
Customization is an exceptional idea when a student is confident with the tools they have. Once a learner knows how to use their knowledge to produce code, customizing it just adds to the fun! It’s the same principle as teaching someone how to draw basic lines and curves before asking a new artist to create something intricate and beautiful.
For a brief introduction to NGSS and the implementation that RoboGarden pursued, you can read more
here.
Why wait? Try a RoboGarden journey.
