Course description

Course overview and purpose:
Do you know the difference between coding and computational thinking skills when it comes to classroom practice and instruction? Join this course to learn new concepts, practices and perspectives about coding and computational thinking.
The course is about what coding and computational thinking are, and why students can benefit from them, while strengthening their problem-solving skills. The course will outline some of the online tools used to teach coding, such as Scratch and other educational resources, such as CoSpaces Edu. You will learn how to use these tools in a creative and engaging way through hands-on activities and exercises to develop projects and lessons for your students. Moreover, the focus of these activities will also be to understand how they can help foster computational thinking and how to explain to your students the steps required to solve problems as a computational thinker. In addition, you will have the chance to discuss those topics with colleagues from other schools in Europe.

Learning outcomes:

• Understand what coding and computational thinking are, what the benefits are, and how you can use them in your class
• Familiarise yourself with computational thinking and explore its use in everyday-life processes
• Learn coding new concepts, practices and perspective
• Feel confident in developing projects on Scratch
• Create interactive virtual space with CoSpaces Edu
• Design coding and computational thinking lessons plans