For the past 3 months, I’ve worked with a team of 4 people to design a curriculum to help 300 middle schoolers start their coding journey. Most of them had little to no experience with programming.
We knew this was going to be a challenging task, but we were certain we could do it.
That is why we decided to teach them in a way which most programmers learn:
- The students would daily watch a video tutorial and follow instructions in it
- They would then solve challenges curated by our team
- Every weekend a doubt solving session was held wherein the concepts were quickly brushed upon and you guessed it, doubts were cleared
Now here are my main takeaways:
1. Teaching takes patience, A LOT OF PATIENCE!
Younger students especially require spoon-feeding at times. Resources which were given to them had to be boiled down enough for them to grasp it.
2. Having clear fundamentals is very important.
Basic things like knowing what is an integer, string, variable etc. are very important, otherwise programming at a later stage becomes very difficult.
3. You must keep your expectations low: Don’t expect to make AAA games after just a month of programming.
To put it bluntly, programming is very,very tough. Takes months of learning to get good at it and there is always something new to learn.
4. Having smaller more achievable goals helps in learning things faster.
This also makes you more confident.
5. Teach your students how to ask doubts and google things.
Before asking doubts one must give a detailed explanation as to what they have tried and have they tried searching it up on the web?Bugs are inevitable and a coder must learn to google stuff when things don’t work out
Conclusion
All went well and in the end we were able to help all the students to get a feel for what programming is like. Our goal was not make full-stack 12-year-old prodigies who work at Facebook but to get them excited about programming and I feel our efforts bore fruit.
Hope you found this post insightful. Have an awesome day, Cheers.
Pictures from: Unsplash
