Is it because of his Puppet Mastery?
Is it because of his Jokes? Is it his energy?
Well it’s probably all of these, plus the fact that he loves kids and understands learning.
This was very evident during tonight’s virtual guest speaker series when Sam Patterson joined my graduate students from Marlboro College to talk about Coding with Young Learners .
As my Create With Code students were finishing up our final projects, I worked on getting some guest speakers to share their experience integrating code in the classroom during Vermont’s celebration of Hour of Code! We totally scored when Sam Patterson, (educator, maker, author) agreed to join us.
It became obvious very quickly that Sam is a big fan of Scratch and Scratch Jr. He quickly shared lots of ideas for using both of these with younger learners in all types of content areas ranging from math to language arts. He challenged us to challenge our youngest students beyond their expectations of what we think they can do- and then proceeded to tell a story of a non reader who could demonstrate that she understood advanced concepts that often bring sixth graders to tears -- Variables and Functions.
Sam even took the time to give my grad students advice on their final projects! Sam’s approachable personality came through across the miles as he generously shared his experience teaching young children and tips from his book "Programming in the Primary Grades - Beyond Hour of Code".
@kevinjgrace
