Learning can happen in the process of making, exploring, experimenting and wondering. This paper reflects on how the authors use thinking-hands as an approach to teaching and how nature is both a context to introduce and encourage students to engage with storytelling and code. Seymour Papert coined the word constructionism, where learning happens during the process of making and the sharing of tangible objects. The authors describe how they have created and facilitated learning experiences to enable students to engage, think and persist in making. The authors reflect on the role a facilitator can have while teaching in a constructionist mode of learning. The authors believe that with imaginative prompts, challenges and interesting coding environments students can be encouraged and supported to learn by making and sharing.

Code is often taught as a subject. This paper describes an approach to introduce the learning of code that is immersive both in ideas and materials. To create these learning experiences, the authors choose a context to explore and then identify physical and digital materials that will allow for making and learning. In these learning experiences materials are introduced so students can observe, create and document, and in the process of making and talking the students engage with the ideas and learn. During the learning experience each student takes forward different materials, ideas, make different outcomes and in the process gain different learnings. These learnings may be related to the context, the materials introduced or more abstract learnings like noticing connections, patterns or understanding code. At regular intervals during the learning experience the authors encourage students to articulate what they have learnt. Students reflect on what they have noticed, found challenging and enjoyed, sometimes these can be the same!

This paper reflects on ways the authors have used nature to encourage students to code. Students are encouraged to observe and draw nature. They are then encouraged to bring their pictures and thoughts to life with code! The process of observing, drawing and coding allows learners to be introduced to code and coding in an environment that appreciates different student's skills and abilities. Students are learning to code, but they are doing so in the context of their pictures, their notes and the objects they have created. The students are not in a coding class, they are in a making situation where they engage with many materials and learning. Students have possibilities to excel in multiple ways, not just being good at code.

The paper reflects on the idea that nature can be used as a context to introduce and encourage students to be more explorative, tenacious and rigorous about code and learning to code. In these learning experiences the reference to nature allows for meaningful conversations. The students and the facilitator are on the same page and so they can have conversations that are grounded in reality. These conversations can be between the facilitator and the student, the students with their peers or even between the student and the object the student is making. The presence of the students' work that is tangible, their visuals and their code, and the visible reality of nature that the student is taking inspiration from. These physical manifestations and reality lend to deeper observations, making and learning especially when students are beginning to learn to code.

Keywords: Coding, teaching, nature, experiential learning, learning experiences, computational thinking, constructionism, Scratch, thinking-hands.