Teaching High School and Middle School Kids Programming?
I'm considering teaching an introduction to programming to high school and middle school kids at my sons' homeschool co-op program. This would be two classes, one for each age group.
Does any one have any suggestions on how to structure this? I haven't programmed anything since college (15 years ago) and I've only taught a few one-off classes to adults - but not an ongoing series to teen/pre-teen kids.
My current thought is to utilize the codehs.com curriculum to let them teach themselves at home and I will facilitate, answer questions, troubleshoot and perform demonstrations. The class is only 1 day per week for a full academic year - so there probably wouldn't be enough lecture time to really 'teach' it all anyway. I'd like to use the 'Intro to Computer Science - Python' course for the highschool kids. This would allow building on the skills in a future class by doing projects on a raspberry pi. For middle school, I'd do the Kano Dog/Scratch based stuff that covers some of the flow control, data structures stuff, but you don't really write much code.
Has anyone completed the codehs courses? Are they worth while and useful?
Are there other resources out there you would suggest?
Thank you for any suggestions and advice!
I can't answer your question about structuring the class, but I would suggest that if you cover how you do it here on Steemit, you should also use the #steemiteducation tag - they're very helpful peeps and using the tag will gain you lots of exposure!
Thanks, I will check it out.
I am a learner myself so I can't tell much from tutor's perspective, but here is one thing I did like to point out by my(student's) point of view.
Learning basics, syntax and so on wasn't very interesting and engaging for me and probably for my classmates as well, and I was in middle school. It was more like a liability in for our brains having more important things to do.
Therefore, when you begin with them, don't tell them the boring stuff. Even if it is the building block of their programming learning experience, they might not really believe it's useful. So, show them how amazing and powerful programs are. How they can use them to make their life easier and so on.
That will help you enjoy teaching and them learning.
:]
Thanks for the advice.
Upvoted ☝ Have a great day!
thanks.