Universal Journal of Educational Research 7(5): 1286-1300, 2019 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/ujer.2019.070514 The Views of Social Studies Teacher Candidates on Coding and Production of Educational Materials through Coding Mustafa Dolmaz Independent Researcher, Turkey Copyright©2019 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License Abstract The aim of this research is to determine the views of social studies teacher candidates on coding and production of educational materials through coding. In the research, document review method, which is one of the qualitative research methods, was employed. A puzzle produced by coding has been examined by teacher candidates. Then, 8 questions were addressed to 40 teacher candidates in order to receive their views through interview forms. Data obtained from the interview form were analyzed by content analysis. When calculating the reliability of the research, the reliability formula developed by Miles and Huberman [20] was used. As a result of the research, it was determined that teacher candidates do not have the knowledge of coding in general, that there is no teacher candidate who produces material by coding except one teacher candidate, but that the majority of teacher candidates want to learn coding. In the views of a majority of teacher candidates, it was revealed that it would be appropriate to give coding education in the high school period. The material produced by coding was found to be simple, fun, informative, summarizer and effective by teacher candidates. Teacher candidates think that such materials are low cost, reusable, attractive, functional and easy to distribute materials, however, they believe that coding has disadvantages such as technical equipment requirement, the high cost of ready-to-use software fees, and a negative impact on students' health. Keywords Coding, Educational Material, Social Studies, Material Production with Coding 1. Introduction The use of information technologies in today's schools, education and teaching activities has brought a new breath to education, and has provided teachers and students with a fun, interesting and more useful way to process the lesson using materials based on information technology [10,14,25]. Initially, information technologies (IT) were only used as a complementary/reinforcing tool for the education system. However, when the principle of self-learning is combined with computer technology, the computer becomes an environment in which learning occurs in education [4]. Computers do not have functional brains and work with commands written by humans. We name this special language, which we use to process commands on the computer, the programming language [18]. Several programming languages have been developed to develop solutions for different needs. Each language consists of its own phrase, spelling rules and commands. Coding, on the other hand, is defined as “the process of writing language-specific commands”. In short, the equivalent of commands given to the computer in programming is code and the whole codes that create computer software are defined as coding [11]. The fact that computer becomes an environment in which learning occurs, makes it necessary to benefit from the coding / programming technology, which existed in various fields from the defense industry to the economy, in educational activities. The introduction of e-school, e-education or online education, especially in recent years, is a result of the educators' efforts to benefit from web-based platforms formed by coding based on information technologies. The existence of coding technology in every field of life made coding/programming education important in many countries in the 21st Century as it facilitates daily work and operation in many fields from the business world to the educational world and the coding skills have started to be accepted as a competence that each individual should have. In fact, “coding in many sources is now considered a part of logical reasoning, which is one of the 21st century skills” and expected by each individual to have [9,24]. Today, children meet technology from the age of three