In class today we discussed computational thinking and gaming in education. During our hands-on lab time I tried the “Learn to code with Anna & Elsa from Frozen”. Below I’ve attached a screen shot of how far I was able to make it with this activity. 

I have very minimal experience with coding so I was challenged by the activity. In middle school I remember using Scratch, and I didn’t even know that I was coding because my teacher didn’t call it that!

During my undergrad I had to use Python and MatLab for a biomechanics course. This was one of the most challenging things I had to do in my schooling, I needed a lot of help and still wouldn’t say that I have an understanding of how to use these programs. During this time (2023) AI was new and not something we were using yet in any of my courses. My professor gave up step-by-step tutorials on how to create the code we needed to do the activity, but I had no understanding of what the code was doing, and how it was getting me to the end product. It would have been helpful to start learning with someone more simple like Scratch or the Anna and Elsa tutorial, to first develop an understanding of how coding works. 

I recognize that physical and health education could include the use of technology for biomechanics topics, however I don’t see a fit for this in the PHE curriculum and I think these topics would be too challenging for most students at a high school level. If students were given the option to use coding in PHE this might be helpful for students who typically don’t like being active/playing sports but enjoy things like computer science. However I don’t see how this would be more beneficial for meeting the curricular standards, than being physically active. As Rylie mentioned in the chat during class, school is often the only time that students are off screens, so as a PHE teacher I try not to incorporate tech during the lesson. I came across the Bad news game a few weeks ago when looking for an activity for my “reliable sources of health information” lesson for a PHE class. However, this activity discussed fake news generally so to avoid any confusion, I decided not to use it as I wanted the lesson focus to be on health messages.