Humans of Code Week – Daniela Grecu , leading Teacher Romania

Publication date: July 8, 2022

By Daniela Grecu , leading Teacher Romania

What sparked your interest in coding / Code Week?

As a computer science teacher, I am interested in coding by nature. Especially, as a computer science teacher at a gymnasium, children are extremely open to new challenges and get involved in solving them. This means that they really enjoy coding applications, and luckily the Internet offers them a lot of coding applications. Some of my favourites are: Scratch, Hour of Code, Code.org, W3Schools and Code Avengers.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to learn / teach coding?

Get started with computer-free activities (such as https://code.org/curriculum/unplugged ), then switch to applications that use code blocks (such as https://scratch.mit.edu/,  https://lab.open-roberta.org,   https://www.code-your-life.org/turtlecoder ). After this you are ready for the applications that use lines of code (Such as Python, C++ and many more).

What do you like most about Code Week?

What I really like about Code Week is that my students and I can carry out coding activities in many different disciplines. This means that my colleagues from various disciplines are open to this type of activity, meaning that I have their collaboration. Also, we teachers are inspired by each other. By using Code Week as a platform, we can collaborate internationally, exchange ideas and good practices and discover various applications.

What are the top three reasons why everyone / kids should learn how to code?

Coding activities help kids develop in many distinct aspects. They help develop their creativity, critical thinking, anticipating results of their actions, how to be more organized, how to collaborate.

Which project/activity related to Code Week are you most proud of, and why?

In the coding week in the last two years, I managed to attract funding through the Meet and Code program for 5 projects. With the help of that funding, I was able to purchase a few educational robots and work with them in class with my students. It is a pleasure for my students to see the results of their code not only on the simulator but also in real life.