In much of the reading I have done in the MET program and in personal reading is how important it is for our students to learn how to code. Coding is important for so many reasons, including organized thinking, cause-effect relationships, understanding how things work. Researchers also believe that most of the careers our students will be entering into will require some coding.
One difficulty with this is how little many of our current teachers know about code. That is not meant as a negative statement rather we were just never exposed to it and we have never had to teach it or use it ourselves. Of course we are intimidated by the thought of teaching our students to code. Thankfully the people at code.org and hour of code have made this so much easier for us.
Any teacher of any grade level can get their students coding with this easy, free program. I have started to learn code along with my students. The beauty of it is I tell students to start where they are; many of course started at grade level and had no idea what they were doing. Slowly but surely they realized they needed to back up and take baby steps. Now most of them love to code and have advanced into other coding areas like raspberry pi and arduino.
Check out code.org and hour of code to learn more.
Catherine