That coding mentality has proliferated every area of the school, and students apply coding principles to all subjects, most often through Swift Playgrounds.
“We realized we’d already been using the skills of coding everywhere in the curriculum,” says Nutt, 28. “When we write, we go back and edit and improve it — we were debugging. We sequence stories, we sequence events and things that we do in our everyday lives. So it’s just making everyone at the school realize that coding really is all around you.”
In Scott’s classroom, her 5- and 6-year-old students practice coding skills in tasks both ordinary and extraordinary. She posed a problem to them: how do you get an escaped dinosaur back into the zoo? Her students decided they would make jam sandwiches and leave them out for the creature.
Scott brought in bread, butter and jam and asked her students to give her step-by-step instructions on how to construct the sandwich. The exercise introduced them to the individual commands required to execute a coding sequence.
“We then left the jam sandwich outside the classroom overnight,” says Scott. “And obviously the dinosaur came back and ate it — the next day there was just a crust.”