Evaluating Students' Experiences of a Weekly "Hour of Code": Cookies or Cake?

In the Winter semester of 2020 during a multimedia design and production class for pre-service teachers, the students were introduced to basic computer coding concepts such as variables, conditional statements, various expressions, logic, and syntax. For their final project, the students were asked to create an interactive instructional app using MIT App Inventor for their own future students in their teaching subjects (such as social studies, mathematics, science, and language arts). They were expected to integrate technical skills and knowledge of interface design, instructional design, and pedagogical strategies. The instructors examined exit tickets submitted at the end of each hour-of-code lesson and course evaluations at the end of the semester for evidence of threshold concepts, students’ learning experiences, and motivation. This brief qualitative study provides a description of the course, coding and computational thinking processes, and the student evaluations. The paper concludes with commentary on lessons learned for teaching coding to pre-service teacher candidates.