This week passed with no significant Snap! use in my class. I believe such lulls in coding activities are to be avoided. Student understanding and comfort with Snap! is fragile and it needs almost daily reinforcement if meaningful scientific programming is the goal to apply the concepts of force, impulse, momentum, and more.
The problem is this: The bulk of my lessons and student materials are unchanged, despite the inclusion of Snap! programming in a significant way. My instruction for long stretches does not utilize Snap! This has also occurred in my two previous semesters attempting to employ coding in physics. The result, I fear, is that using Snap! appears to students to be its own thing and not connected to the physics, despite how I frame the assignments. Some students feel this gives them license to ease up on effort on what they perceive to be a minor piece of the class.
I see two solutions. The first is in my control and will take a good amount of effort and practice. I need to transform my delivery of physics instruction and student materials so that Snap! is regularly used by me as a presentation aid or used by students to some degree. Snap! is designed in a way that makes this possible, but it will take a lot of thinking and planning to figure out how to do this well - and a good amount of time modifying or creating new student documents. If I can succeed in doing this, I may create enough student immersion into Snap! to make it a more natural mode for thinking and solving problems. This is my best shot to deliver the physics content of my course while developing student skill to code with Snap! Such radical changes are what summers are for.
The second solution (a hope, really) is to wait for the students to come into my classroom already being proficient in Scratch coding. When that occurs, the use of Snap! in my physics class will require much less effort and it might be naturally embraced by students as a tool for learning and applying knowledge. Unfortunately, this is years away. I am too impatient to wait for this, but I will do what I can to promote coding in the earlier grades. Yesterday, my school district’s technology coach asked me to lead a summer session on Scratch coding for elementary level teachers. I accepted the offer.