If you’re one of the increasing number of connected educators, you can hardly fail to have felt the pressure to improve our students’ understanding of the world of computing, computer science or coding. There’s a big push here in the UK, but also more widely around the world. From non-profits like Code Club and Code.org to large organisations like the BBC and Mozilla, the resources they’re deploying to encourage young people into coding and computing are expanding daily.
Given that background, it can be a bit daunting for those of us with little experience or knowledge in these areas to know where to start. However when you begin to ‘lift the hood/bonnet’ on certain applications with which we’re already familiar, there are lots of little tweaks and tricks which become possible with only a rudimentary appreciation of code.
Let’s take an example. I often embed Youtube videos within our school learning platform, or indeed on my blogs – if you do too, you’ll be aware that we’re already into the world of coding, even if it’s only copying and pasting an embed code from one place to another. Whilst in the ‘Embed’ context-sensitive panel under a YouTube video, I often change the video size to one more suitable for small form-factor devices like smart phones. And here’s a first coding learning opportunity; as you change the video size, the embed code changes to reflect that. So how about having students embed YouTube (or Vimeo) videos into a site1 so they have the opportunity to make that kind of change and watch what happens to the code … or even tweak the code manually and see what happens to the video. Let them explore what the code element ‘frameborder=”0”’ means by changing the figure and see what happens.
But it was whilst doing this that I spotted another option underneath the video sizing tool I’d not noticed before. “Enable privacy enhanced mode” which had a help link next to it for me to follow. In there it explained about the privacy enhanced mode … but more about the embed options too. So to make a video play automatically for example, you just add an extra bit of code (“&autoplay=1”) into the embed code. Or to start a video at a certain time, just add another code segment. Here then we can have students ‘hack’ code to make something different happen. Hacking extant code is a great place to start learning, rather than trying to code something from scratch – you get instant feedback on whether what you did is right. From here they could go on to search for other code snippets which can be used to change the way videos are displayed or played – maybe have them explore how to caption YouTube videos and think about why that might be important for some people.
And all that from a site which many students access every day as consumers, but one which used in a slightly different way, might just get them thinking a little more about the coding that makes it work.
(1Set one up using Weebly or Google sites, perhaps themed for your subject and have them add videos which illustrate one aspect of your course – a great way to gather resources for a topic with the minimum of effort surely?)
Practically In the pICTure 