New Stuff

Refreshed my interest in putting teaching materials online lately.

Issues I had:

• I didn't have enough creative control - I have a vision for it, I know how it should work
• Too teacher focused - make exercises students can do in their own time, give teachers good questions to ask students and discuss with them
• Not beginner focused enough, we were losing people from the very start
• Too egotistical - students don't give a hoot about hearing about our Rails Camp
• Too much Ruby, I think it'd be better to use Scratch and transition into JavaScript
• Not structured enough - I think I'd rather put a whole guided syllabus online for people to work through, & if they want they can go back and focus on one part of it
• Not a good enough feedback mechanism built in

So

• Start from Scratch (Scratch.app), e.g. kids who did Code Club and want to learn more
• Do exercises in Scratch to build a habit of visualising code structure and execution flow
• Transition into JavaScript (using Phaser or Canvas API to keep things fun and visual)
• Stream on C (using a graphics API to keep things fun and visual, or maybe coloured terminal output)
• Stream on functional programming (using graphics of course)
• Focus on ->> beginners <<-
• Explain core competancies to students and give them exercises in these
  • visualising execution flow
  • predicting execution flow
  • seeing code indentation/structure
  • spotting syntax mistakes like mismatching brackets
  • using stackoverflow to get unstuck
• Some more focus on errors
  • often errors are good talking points and learning experiences
  • beginners sometimes feel bad when they get an error but they should learn to try to break things
  • whole exercises devoted to trying to break things and discussing what happens
• Some more focus on psychology of beginners
  • trying to break things
  • externalising blame vs internalising blame
  • how to approach mentors/teachers
  • where and how to ask questions / netiquette