Yep! They sure did!
This year coding was placed into the new Ontario Math Curriculum, and as a person who enjoys dabbling in a little code herself, it was a great opportunity to share my enthusiasm around writing code, as well as connecting it to our Financial Literacy Units!
Grade 7 just completed their Financial Literacy unit looking at/and understanding various chequing accounts, savings accounts, investment opportunities, federal taxes, earnings statements, and simple interest rates. We even had a guest speaker join us to talk about investing, trade, stocks and bonds. We also completed a unit on currency exchange. So to end things off, they are currently working on and almost complete in making their own apps that will covert five different foreign currencies into $CAD. Some students are even taking the initiative and extension to add more currencies and even a separate $CAD to foreign exchange rate program. One student, even enjoyed code so much that they went and created their own script through Java to do a parallel task. Take a look at his blog post! Talk about personalized learning! Here are the blog posts from the grade seven students talking about their coding experience and their apps (yes.. you can even try some of them out!)
Grade 8 also just concluded their Financial Literacy unit where they investigated and calculated more complex foreign exchange units, credit card debt, monthly statements, and calculating simple and compounding interest. For their final task; they are also creating an app to calculate Simple and Compound Interest Rates, using various compounding rates (annually, semi-annually, or monthly) as well as varying principal amounts and future values.
Here are the Grade 8 reflections on their coding experiences and again, yes, you can try them out too (if they provided the link in their reflections!)
So if you know someone, who needs to convert foreign currency, or know how much interest they will have to pay on a 25 year semi-annually compounded mortgage…reach out to a middle school student….and yes- they are uploadable to your phone!
Pretty cool, right! Way to go Grade 7 and 8!
….and by the way…don’t worry Grade 6, you are currently finishing up your unit rates and taxes unit… you’re next in June! Get ready!