Building on the Basics with Kodable Creator

"Productive failure is a huge part of any STEM or STEAM program," says Ms. Mertz. "That trial and error of looking at what you made and asking how do you make it better? Or if you failed, asking how you can look at it a different way? It's very hard for elementary students to look at their failures through this lens and understand that it's a good thing."

For Ms. Mertz's upper elementary students, Kodable Creator was a new tool to help facilitate productive failure in her classroom.

"We do a lot of testing, putting pieces of code together and testing it out to see what happens and figure it out from there…Kodable Creator definitely allowed my upper elementary students to see what real code looked like and gave them the ability to engage with it to learn and explore."

Ms. Mertz teaches students as young as two years old all the way through middle school. With that age range comes a number of challenges to find age appropriate tools to provide meaningful coding experiences for all her learners, especially now that AI has entered the conversation.

With AI being such a hot topic in education right now, Ms. Mertz is thinking a lot about how AI fits into her classrooms. "AI isn't going anywhere. How do I as an educator shape my instruction and shape how students interact with AI so that they understand how to use it in a responsible way?"

Ms. Mertz has found that Kodable Creator's use of AI-powered tutor CatBot helps answer her students' questions, and some of her own. "Students were able to type in their questions to CatBot and get an appropriate response which was really cool. Of course, we had some students test the AI and ask silly questions. And obviously it's programmed to not answer in certain ways so the students learned very quickly that they weren't going to get the responses they were hoping for... It was a good moment to talk about appropriate use of AI and inappropriate use of AI and how you know that it is programmed to do a certain job. It's not just an all-knowing entity."

In addition to learning how to appropriately use AI, Ms. Mertz immediately saw the benefit CatBot could provide in helping her facilitate learning. "CatBot is wonderful because they're able to have more independence with what they do and not necessarily rely on me. They can ask their question to CatBot and it feels authentic, it feels like something they would see and use in the real world, not just in school." Ms. Mertz also was pleased with how CatBot let students who were more shy or typically wouldn't ask their teacher for help, be able to ask CatBot for help right in their game.