Teaching Kids Programming–Video Training for Teachers

We’ve been making short videos on how to teach the parts of each recipe.  Not all recipes are complete, but we are working on it…

Each recipe consists of the following parts and key components (for teachers):

*) Setup – teachers should pair students w/5 minute rotations and should use Virtual Proctor

1) Recipe – teachers should have students read the lines of English, teachers should NOT tell the (code) answer, rather teachers SHOULD encourage use of the editor (Intellisense exploration), reading of included documentation and examples.

2) Recap – teachers should introduce programming concept words, ex. objects, methods.  teachers should point out ‘help’ from editor, i.e. Intellisense.  Teachers should make mistakes, such as missing arguments and show how to read error messages.

3) Variation – teachers should ask students to name the properties of the completed recipes shape, i.e. line length, line width, etc…and should write on the white board as a grid (see example for SQUARE recipe below).  Teachers should should guide students from simple changes, i.e. change variables from one constant value, such “blue” to “red”, then to complex changes, such as Colors.Red to Colors.GetRandomColor().

4) Quiz – Teachers should explain the format, i.e. translate one line, then run it to see if you got it right.  Teachers should guide pairs to discovering the answer by having them read the line of English if stuck, use editor to explore and to read the documentation (including the examples).  Teachers should encourage kids to run the quiz after they’ve translated each question.  Teachers should remind pairs if stuck to use ‘UNDO’ to get back to a working state.

5) Homework – Teachers should run the first couple of homework questions as a group.  Teachers should encourage pairs to change ONLY the ‘___’

We have made videos for parts 1,2 & 4 so far.  We are working on making ‘how-to-teach’ videos for the rest of the processes (i.e. ‘variation’, etc…in the near future). 

How to teach SQUARE recipe

How to teach SQUARE recap

How to teach SQUARE quiz

If you are teaching our courseware to kids somewhere, let us know how it’s going!  We LOVE to get feedback.