I read and mapped Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming by Yasmin B. Kafai & Quinn Burke and then created a Mind Map based off of what I read. The quest asked for us to use Coggle but I find it a bit cumbersome so I decided to use a Mind Mapping service that I have found to work a bit better and I had already bought a six-month plan for it. The mind mapping tool is called Mind Meister, and I think it has some excellent options like WunderBild magic tool that scrubs your content in a box and tries to come up with a suitable image that correlates with your information. Images connected to my notes helps me remember what I was thinking about at the time of reading the materials. Although in my notes I did not have images when I started compiling the mind map it was noticeably cooler to have the images there with the notes for each chapter.
When thinking about Computational Thinking and the way that Jeanette Wing explained it for simpletons like me in “Lego terms, ” it is easy to connect the fact that thinking like hers is what pushes people like those who create cool tools like Mind Meister. It is also wonderful to read anecdotal experiences of people like Seymour Papert when he talks about his love for gears and how they connected his love of cars to his love of computational thinking. One of the biggest ideas in the book is taking code from the cloud to something tangible. Making students understand that what they accomplish online can intertwine with what they end up doing for the rest of their life. I have so many young ladies in my middle school classroom who are talking about being Bio Medical Engineers when they grow up because they want to make prostheses for veterans who lost their limbs in battle. Bio Medical Engineer was not something that I even dreamed of becoming when I was their age, and that was only fifteen years ago, so I am excited to see where this computational connectedness pushes students in the future. Please see a link to my mind map (https://mm.tt/697466715?t=OIzyNpXpgI)
