INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES COURSE

Believing in the fact that the countries to survive in the future will be the ones who not only use, but also produce technology, our aim is to create a culture of using technology and to maximize each student’s capacity in this respect. To achieve this, we aim to equip our students with technology literacy information and skills as well as the entrepreneurship skills via technology. Our k-12 course contents include computer literacy skills, 3D design, computer programming, robotics, and web design.


ACQUISITIONS

Our courses are detailed according to the students’ age and level to develop the knowledge and skills structured onto the following standards.

Information Literacy

  • The students can demonstrate the basic knowledge and skills required to use information and communication technologies correctly and securely.
  • They can be aware of the individual and social contributions of information and communication technologies in terms of cultural and social aspects and develop a positive attitude.
  • They can take personal responsibility about life-long learning and ability to learn independently.
  • They can act responsively about information ethics, privacy, and security.

Communicating, Sharing Information, and Expressing Oneself by Using Information Technologies

  • They can communicate effectively and realize their ideas and projects by using information tools.
  • They can organize the information and their ideas in ways to be understood by different target audience and share them via media.
  • They can develop social and cultural understanding about virtual environments by communicating with different groups.
  • They can use and administer social media effectively.

Research, Structuring Information and Cooperative Work

  • They can access information, analyze it, and understand the significance and power of producing information out of information.
  • They can use different tools and approaches in the processes of structuring information.
  • They can produce common products and projects by using various virtual environments, media, and software types.

Problem Solving, Programming, and Authentic Product Development

  • They can develop strategies to solve a problem and use different points of view and approaches as they produce solutions.
  • They can recognize the authoring and programming languages and use at least one authoring/programming language effectively.
  • They can create models, simulations, and animations to investigate systems and subjects.

1st AND 2nd GRADES / CODING COURSE

WHAT IS CODING (PROGRAMMING) EDUCATION?

By planning coding (programming) education in our school starting from an early age, we aim to instill many skills and abilities in our students such as mathematical and analytical thinking infrastructure, concentration, analysis-synthesis, both result and process-oriented thinking, using the inner motivation, using imagination, creative thinking, design-oriented thinking, critical thinking, seeing the relationships between events. Of course, we do not expect every student who learns to code to become programmers or developers.

We want our students to be able to find solutions to the problems they encounter in other courses more quickly; to be able to establish relations between events an understand the subjects more quickly; to be more creative as they work; and to leave the rote-learning thinking structure behind and be able to think more analytically thanks to these abilities they gain in our classes.

To this end, the Coding classes are taught for one hour a week in the 1st and 2nd grades with different activities.

WELL, WHAT SORT OF PRACTICES ARE INVOLVED IN THE LESSONS TO ACHIEVE THESE GOALS?

First of all, we organize unplugged classroom activities with our young students, which can be applied without the need for a computer environment (Unplugged Coding), to improve their computational thinking skills. Some of these activities are Leading the Labyrinth, Making a Tower with a Straw and Play Dough, Glass Game, Let’s Put the Cards in Order. With these games, our students learn some concepts that are the basis of programming learning by using different materials other than computers. (Operation Sequence, Algorithmic Thinking, the Concept of Direction, Instruction Reading, Sequencing…)

 

After these activities, we begin to practice with the students on computer. There are many applications in the computer environment that are designed to gain algorithmic thinking skills and vary according to the age and level of students. In our coding lessons, we include the activities we have selected from the “Code.org” platform that make children love programming and enable them to learn in an entertaining way. In our lessons, we are working on the content called “Course1”, which has activities for children aged 4-6 with our 1st graders, and “Course2” with activities for children aged 6 and over with our 2nd graders. Our students can use their computers at home without any membership process; they can repeat the activities from https://studio.code.org/s/course1 and https://studio.code.org/s/course2. Thanks to these activities, students learn the basic concepts of programming education. They also lay the basis of programming language education that will be taught in the following years.