Incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing in to our practice as educators is an essential part of truth and reconciliation.
This class activity, called Beaded Tweets, was teaching coding through beading. Each bead represents a bit, and the string of beads is using eight-bit character codes to spell a word.
This connection is intriguing to me because I am interested in exploring alternative forms of math education, and it opens up ideas for me in terms of creating lesson plans that involve beading or other indigenous forms of artistic expression. One of these ideas is to incorporate story as a way to instruct in a more engaging manner as well as honouring the First Peoples Principles of Learning. In particular, “Learning is embedded in memory, history, and story.”