Not a school teacher, but I’ve been teaching a kids’ programming class for two years, and a math class for the past few months. I also did more math teaching in the past. My advice is to find one or two students (better if they aren’t too smart or motivated) and start teaching them on a regular schedule, in person, as soon as possible. By all means, bring your own ideas and be all excited about them, it’s more fun that way :-)
That’s the #1 thing you must do. Start arranging it today. This hour.
Still in early stages, I’ve only been teaching them for 5 weeks so far (1 hour per week).
My approach is to set them onto a task, and get them to attempt it on their own. If they are struggling, I tell them that before I will help them they need to just try a few of the first things that come to mind, see what happens, and if they still need help I will walk them through figuring it out for themselves.
Only very rarely do I explicitly tell any of the kids how to do a specific thing.
Not a school teacher, but I’ve been teaching a kids’ programming class for two years, and a math class for the past few months. I also did more math teaching in the past. My advice is to find one or two students (better if they aren’t too smart or motivated) and start teaching them on a regular schedule, in person, as soon as possible. By all means, bring your own ideas and be all excited about them, it’s more fun that way :-)
That’s the #1 thing you must do. Start arranging it today. This hour.
I also teach a kids programming class currently. I also run youth movement activities for kids most wekeends and on holiday camps!
Cool! What’s your approach to teaching programming? What age are the kids? Sorry for prying, I’m just very curious.
So the kids I teach are about 7-12 years old.
Still in early stages, I’ve only been teaching them for 5 weeks so far (1 hour per week).
My approach is to set them onto a task, and get them to attempt it on their own. If they are struggling, I tell them that before I will help them they need to just try a few of the first things that come to mind, see what happens, and if they still need help I will walk them through figuring it out for themselves.
Only very rarely do I explicitly tell any of the kids how to do a specific thing.
Thanks! :-)
What kind of tasks? Is it a game like LightBot, or an educational tool like Scratch, or a real programming language straight away?
We use the block courses of the website Code.Org. It’s similar to scratch in some regards. Not familiar with LightBot.