Curriculum connections -- in what ways are the activities in the makerspace connected to the current curriculum in your school? Describe collaborations, if any, with teachers.

I am working with the 6th grade social studies teacher who is teaching geography and ancient civilizations right now. She has already brought her classes into the library for a research lesson on the ABC-CLIO World Geography database. The students have to research a country and make a travel guide book and for me, since I teach the entire 6th grade a library skills class, they will make a website about their country. Or maybe just a web page. I haven’t gotten to this yet. This way, I am teaching both coding, and how to create something that is relevant to what they are doing in social studies. I only have 18 students in my computer programming elective but I have 30 kids in each of my 6th grade library skills classes. I tried teaching coding to a much larger group last year and it was really challenging. Some kids understood that you had to be absolutely precise when copying code but some kids didn’t. Hence, they did not understand why their code wasn’t working when they went to look at it in a browser. For some kids, having to be so precise is tedious and takes too much effort. I understand. But the reward is worth it to see your creation on the web and know that you made something for the internet. So with a large group, if everyone makes just one little mistake, I have to check the code of 30 students, which means that while I am helping one student, 29 other students are not getting my help. It is much easier to teach coding to a smaller group so I am glad I have my computer programming elective this year. I will give it a go with coding with my larger classes, whereby I want to integrate their social studies lessons into my library classes, and see how they do.