I have recently been presenting my middle school technology students with some VEXcode VR challenges. One student who struggles so much in his core classes of math and reading so took off and coding just clicked!! He voluntarily came up to me after class and said “I’m actually good at this, can you send me more puzzles.” How many other teachers have found that presenting students with coding allows them a non-traditional way to finally feel successful in school???
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That’s awesome! I wonder if you could encourage this student to explain how he is making sense of the challenge to others - my guess would be that there is probably some great spatial/logical reasoning and/or computational thinking practices that he’s using that could be applied to some of those other classes that are more of a struggle for him. Could be a good ‘gateway’ to help him take that positive engagement and extend it in other directions. And of course, more VR challenges along the way!! 
I find some of our students who struggle at other subjects do well because coding is logical and you can find success quickly, which encourages students to push themselves. Many times students look at math and say “I can’t do this” because it looks complicated. The STEM labs and activities for all the platforms break everything down into smaller attainable chunks.
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