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One kid wrote a basic brick breaker and another pong. They all seemed to enjoy the process since it's pretty straight forward drag/drop logic.
Doing it on paper by hand first is more important then it sounds, so they can really understand a)what they are coding, b)how fricking awesome computers really are.
https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_...
I've been planning on using Mozilla's Learning program (https://learning.mozilla.org/en-US/) a shot.
It's 2 separate sessions (1 for each age group) and 2 weeks in total. I have already outlined my plan based on it that I'm happy to share.
Does anyone have experience using their platform - share some thoughts?
TLDR: Focus on getting them to have fun & enjoy learning about 'code'. Don't care so much on how well they learn it.
Every kid is unique & will respond to different things.
Social & mentors are awesome. It's usually more fun to build with others if possible. Also they will want to easily share & show off their creations with others.
Show them how to "hack" Google with the browser's dev inspector tools. Wins them over every time.
Give them simple partially completed programs that they can modify. I've had a lot of success with a simple trivia game that lets them start by modifying the questions/answers & the replies it gives. A great first lesson in how to use strings & gets them looking at the code. They can then share what they created with others (social aspect) & have them play their game.
Do NOT lecture to them or try to do long demos. They often listen to teachers lecture all day long. They want to have fun & explore. They also don't care about types or any other computer science terms until they've created a lot of things & are trying to figure out why they don't work.
I've had decent results with Scratch. For pure beginners though, still start them off with a semi-completed program.
Some other thing could be Scratch/Kara, but I'm not sure if it exists in english and personally I don't like it.
I've done this for several years. Here's what I've learned. TLDR: Focus on getting them to have fun & enjoy learning about 'code'. Don't care so much on how well they learn it. Every kid is unique & will respond to different things. Social & mentors are awesome. It's usually more fun to build with others if possible. Also they will want to easily share & show off their creations with others. Show them how to "hack" G…
Another suggestion that works for the same reason is to give kids code to play with. I've wasted 20 minutes of class time having kids write a three line "Hello World!" javascript program from scratch. All this did was irritate and bore the kids out of their minds as they struggled with syntax and hunt-and-peck typing.
Instead, when I give kids a great big block of javascript code that does something fun and animated, those kids will go wild with it. This is because changes to different variables can have big effects. They quickly learn to read the code and identify what different parts do. They break the code, and you show them how that's a good thing and how easy it is to revert it back so that it's working again. Code should be a playground. Give the kids a rich playground to run around in.
Perhaps something to explore as a platform as well as it's not too expensive and comes with what you need to hack around.
It comes with Minecraft Py installed and has a few tasks to customize a level, character, etc. Python dev tools comes installed as well as Scratch and other exercises.
The idea of gamifying tasks across the platform is interesting especially if you think of a class of folks and a leaderboard or something - maybe not something to stress but some folks like competition more than others to drive them to learn.
I've been working indirectly with school districts doing this for a couple years now, and have seen great results from curriculum very similar to this -- https://code.org/educate/curriculum/elementary-school#overvi...
There are other courses for different ages, too. Not sure what age groups you are looking at...
Once they know computational thought, THEN teach them how to code for an app.