Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. I worked with the teacher to create a lesson that would seamlessly embed vocabulary into his programming class to highlight the critical importance of verbs when following programming instructions.

Luckily, computational literacy is accessible even to people who have no computer science training because the concepts are reflected in real world situations and general problem solving. Students need to understand how computer programs work in order to build the foundation to learn programming. We wanted his students to think and read like programmers, so we focused on computational literacy, which “requires being able to do computer programming at some level,” according to Bruce Sherin of Northwestern University. We surmised that if students worked on comprehending the directions, they might find greater success in the class, on the exam, and hopefully throughout their academic courses.

As we analyzed one of his lessons, I noticed the multitude of directions students needed to follow to create an accurate program. We discussed ways he could assist his students in reading this year. To support that position, I met with our computer science teacher at the end of last year. School leaders recognize the need for literacy instruction to become a schoolwide priority-in all courses, not just English and the humanities. Good, solid literacy instruction is the right of every student and the responsibility of all educators.

Encoding in literacy