On our last session at Harwin, we had the pleasure of Noelle Peppin, @beaded_tweets on “X” join us on Zoom to teach us how to code via ‘Beaded Tweets’.

Noelle is an Indigenous bead worker, and educator who taught us how she has created a way to integrate Indigenous education in the curriculum and helping teachers apply this in their everyday classroom teachings. As Noelle explored many ways on how she could incorporate Indigenous education in wa fun and engaging way, she decided to teach students how to bead through coding. Not only was this a way to learn that beading is a sacred to the culture, but it also involved math, patterns and creativity.

Through coding, Noelle taught students and us Teacher Candidates how to design a bracelet that could be coded to say something specific. She found a way to do this through ASCII and colours. Noelle found a coded sheet with both Lower and Upper case letters of the alphabet, and numbers. Not only has Noelle taken this learning into her own classrooms, but she has expanded her teachings to others. She encourages the teachings of bead work in classes; however you can only teach it if you have been taught the importance of the cultural links of beading. This is important to the Indigenous culture, as we have to respect the culture, and not “steal” another person’s work or story of learning. Beading has more meaning behind it then we might see, so as educators we need to make sure we have permission to use it first and know factual information to what beading stand for. “Beading takes discipline, it can be frustrating, but we are to continue to persevere and help students with their frustrations of beading” (Pepin, 2025).

After Noelle shared her knowledge with us, she allowed us to pick a word that had meaning and that was important to us to code. The word i picked was “RAY”. I picked my significant other because he is a very important person in my life, and when I think of him I think of “Ray of Sunshine”. Which is what lead me to pick orange and yellow as my coloured beads. This process of beading and coding was easy and ended up being a very fun way to engage with coding while beading.