Better Professional Practice for Educators

“When will I ever use this?” may already be among our favorite questions as math educators… or maybe not. As math teachers, we model the “everyday” use of math in our classrooms. Unlike our students, our daily context is math, so while we see the value in the things we teach, it takes some creativity to convince the average student that many of the concepts and skills we teach are actually useful.

We try our best to model the use of mathematics by role-playing as scientists, architects, engineers, and the like as we demonstrate and assign application problems. So maybe you’re thinking, “when will I ever use this?” when it comes to programming. Or maybe you’re anticipating that your students will ask the same question and this time, you’ll come up short.

At Code For You Kids, we believe that learning to program will make you a better equipped and more creative teacher- this has certainly been the case for us. From classroom management tools to demonstrations and simulations, coding offers us one more tool for our teaching tool belts- and an incredibly powerful one.

For example, do you wish you had a program to separate your class into random groups of a particular size. Sure, you could write their names on paper and pull them out of a hat. But if you could code, you could import all of your class rosters to an IDE and use a program like this one sort them instantly as you prep your lesson! Your hat will thank you.