Illustration credit: Nadine El Gamal, Grade 8

In Middle School Coding class at AISE, students learn how to break down problems, organize their thinking, and construct solutions. The focus of the course is on drawing and animation, which are the building blocks of video games! Students first outline their ideas using flowcharts. The outcome of this process is finding out the basic requirements of each design. What shapes are being used in my drawing? How can I break down complex shapes into simpler ones? Using these requirements, students create modular functions – pieces of code that perform a single action – that are used directly (e.g. to draw a square) or indirectly to build more complex functions (e.g. drawing a window using multiple squares). They then start constructing the program while continuously evaluating and redeveloping their code following the design cycle. Students learn how to think critically and algorithmically while collaborating on challenging, self-directed projects.