Chris Betcher

I had the pleasure this week to be a guest on Code4Kids, a webinar series with Kelly Moore. Kelly is a teacher and tech coach in Melbourne, and she asked if I'd come on the show and talk about the use of Scratch to help teach computational thinking and coding. Well, you might know I'm a bit of a Scratch fanboy so I didn't take too much convincing! Rather than just talk about theory stuff, we actually created a classic but simple guessing game in Scratch during the live show.  I thought this was a good example because it uses quite a few fundamental programming constructs such as sequencing, looping and branching, etc. It also makes good use of Boolean comparisons, if-then decisions, and reassignment of variables. Throw in some simple maths like random number generation, greater than and less than operators, and it's the start of some simple yet sophisticated Scratch coding. It was nice to get some comments from the livestream viewers that they learned something ...

I was at the ACEC Conference in Adelaide recently where I bumped into the ABC Splash team and got chatting with the wonderful Annabel Astbury. We were talking about getting kids coding and the importance of digital technologies in schools. One thing led to another and I was given an opportunity to write a series of three blog posts on the importance of coding for children as part of ABC Splash's buildup to the Hour of Code. If you'd like to read them you can find them here... Part 1 - More than a Game: Why Coding will help kids for life Part 2 -  Programs to help students with key coding concepts Part 3 -  Coding: something for everyone (and here's the proof!) As well as these three written posts I was also interviewed for a video series on the importance of coding, which was released as part of the Hour of Code promotions. Thanks to Annabel and the team for the opportunity to contribute to what I think is a very important conversation to have. Our cu...

The following press release  was written by Dr Jason Zagami, president of the ACCE, in response to the recent review of the Australian Curriculum. This review, undertaken by Ken Wiltshire and Kevin Donnelly on behalf of the Liberal government makes a number of recommendations that are hard to understand in their inconsistency and lack of vision. Here is Jason's press release. Please spread it around. For immediate release Australian Council for Computers in Education has deep concerns with inconsistent support for school computing in the government's response to the Review of the Australian Curriculum ACCE has considered the Review of the Australian Curriculum Report and Supplementary Material, and is deeply concerned by some of the recommendations being considered by the government in the Initial Australian Government Response. While ACCE acknowledges concern about a perceived overcrowding of the primary curriculum, there are many ways to address this other than a return to ...

While not every student might want to write their own software, understanding the big ideas of coding is a skill that all students would benefit from, even the very young ones. Understanding the key ideas of computational thinking – identifying patterns, thinking algorithmically, manipulating data, solving real problems, etc – is an important step in helping our students build mastery over their world. This presentation aims to take you on a guided tour through some of the resources available to your students to help them learn the principles of creating code.  It starts by looking at a range of desktop and mobile apps suitable for teaching very young students to program, right through to tools and websites that can help your older students learn to hack code, and much more. If you do actually try any of this stuff out, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. PS: This is my fourth contribution to the K12 Online Conference , and I think it's a great format for an o...

I saw an email from someone today suggesting that they would be starting next term to teach their students to write HTML code from scratch, so the kids could make their own webpages. My initial reaction when I read this message was to ask "Why?" Why would anyone bother to learn HTML coding from scratch when there are so many great editing tools around? Surely, in a WYSIWYG world, learning how to to actually write HTML code is a complete waste of time? With so many great web editing tools around, isn't learning to write raw HTML code a pointless exercise? In once sense, these are valid questions. There's no doubt that the majority of websites these days are created using a templated approach and an "engine" such as Wordpress , Drupal , Joomla , Squarespace , etc. It's also true that for any really customised web work, it would still fall to a workhorse like Adobe Dreamweaver or something else, such as excellent free tools like KompoZer or  NVU edi...