Although I have heard of the Hour of Code activity, I have never used it before. I went to Code.org and found a poem art activity that used coding to illustrate the mood of a poem. I was highly skeptical that I could use coding for poetry analysis, but I was pleasantly surprised at the simplicity and easy-to-follow instructions of the tutorial.
Like Moen’s experience with Coding with Scratch, I was able to use critical thinking to try to match the movements of the sprites with my interpretation of the meaning of line of poetry. (Moen, 2016). By experimenting the different sizes of sprites, backgrounds, and movements, I was able to pretty accurately capture the mood of Langston Hughes’ poem, “Harlem.” Here’s the link to my finished product — https://studio.code.org/projects/poetry_hoc/tRAB5qEB_g4WLmiNgLY_MojrHJXY0ADFcxasl-H6OqE
As an English teacher, I am always looking for activities that are engaging and student-centered. I can imagine that my students would find this activity much more fun than traditional methods of analyzing poetry as it provides a visual representation of their thinking that they sometimes struggle to articulate in writing. The coding follows the same analytical pattern as traditional literary analysis.
I never realized that by teaching students to analyze poetry, I was also them teaching computational thinking, which is defined as “identifying problems, breaking apart or decomposing the problem into smaller parts, finding patterns, and designing solutions.” (American Library Association, 2018). The idea of breaking down each line of a poem to find its mood, tone, theme, symbolism, and figurative language and using each of these parts to discover its meaning and purpose, not only increases my students’ ability to think critically, but also provides them with deeper understanding and appreciation of poetry. The fact that they can use coding to analyze poetry and have fun while doing it, brings a smile to my face.
References
American Library Association. (2018, November 26). How computational thinking fits within library services”. Ready to Code. http://www.ala.org/tools/readytocode/how-computational-thinking-fits-within-library-services
Moen, M. (2016, September 30). Computer coding literacy: Librarians lead the connection. International Literacy Association. https://www.literacyworldwide.org/blog/literacy-now/2016/09/30/computer-coding-and-literacy-librarians-lead-the-connection