We’ve designed our approach to teaching coding around teachers with little to no experience. Ultimately, the vast majority of teachers throughout the US are not Computer Science or Engineering majors. They come from a variety of academic backgrounds and often have very little experience programming during school or during work. It’s an immense amount of work teaching students, so it makes sense that they haven’t had the opportunity to dive head first into the world of programming in their free time.
However, during this time, they’ve honed their skills as teachers. They know how to leverage resources, support their students, and encourage learning in ways that a computer or videos could never come close to replicating. We’ve built resources that they’ve become accustomed to such as student workbooks, course outlines, and flexible professional development that they can do on their time. The curriculum aligns with a variety of standards, making it easy for teachers to adapt the pace of the class and lessons to ensure they’re fulfilling the standards that matter to their students’ futures.
Teachers tap into this uniqueness and give their students opportunities to express themselves through coding.
The majority of the teachers using Code Naturally come from a Liberal Arts background. This is huge for students, especially those with anxiety around math and doubt their ability to take on technical challenges such as learning to code.
Learning to code enables you and your students to make stuff that you want to make. We makes that easy – whether you’re writing your first line of code or making your 10th game, our app has everything you need to get going.
Unlike our competitors, we don’t want students to play games to learn to code. We want them to make games to learn to code. When students have a say in how they’ll use what they’re learning, their motivation and drive is limitless.
We listen to teachers to ensure that we’re providing what we promise and never stop improving.
We’re strong believers that coding is just a means to an end and not the end itself. After seeing what teachers can do as they teach their kids to code, this belief is only reinforced. Here are some examples from the field:
An educator put a new twist on the same-old state map project. Students programmed an illustration of a state and made it interactive where you learn through hovering your mouse over different cities.
An elementary school teacher thought of a clever way to help students understand the layers of the Earth after teaching them how to code in Code Naturally. A great way to combine research, coding, and presentation.
A middle school English teacher mixed coding and literature for one of our favorite assignments. In order to get extra credit on a book report, students can create an animation of their favorite passage in the book.
We’re always looking for new ways to improve our site and learn more about how we can best serve educators and students around the world. Just send us a message and we’ll get back to you on as soon as we can.
Made with ♥️ in Santa Cruz . © 2019