The First question I asked myself was: Is my club ready to move to Python?
The answer was: Yes! for a simple reason, my students have mastered Scratch and they want more!. You can decide to move to a text-based programming language with your students. Let it be their decision so that they commit to the training and they will feel the ownership of their learning.
The Second question was: How I am going to implement this in an online settings?
* Due to the COVID19 pandemic, we moved all our training online.
Research
I needed to understand the transitioning from image-based to text-based programming and the best way to that is to take a course or attend several sessions. So, I finished the SCRATCH TO PYTHON: MOVING FROM BLOCK- TO TEXT-BASED PROGRAMMING course by the Raspberry Pi Foundation on FutureLearn and got the certification.
Engaging Students
The most challenging part in an online teaching/training session is student engagement. I had to find ways to encourage the children to participate and be engaged to the session and not fall asleep or get bored. I tested several ways and these were the most successful methods:
- Annotations: All our sessions are provided using Zoom as meeting platform, one of the features I found useful was participants annotations. Students can use these annotations to draw, write and to put stamps, in this way they felt engaged with the session. An example on how I pulled this through is when we were learning about selections, I prepared the image bellow and asked them to colour it based on the correct number (colour by number)
- Whiteboard: You can use annotations on a whiteboard and let the students brainstorm or answer questions. You can use Zoom's whiteboard or Miro which is interactive and engaging platform, you can invite your club to participate to the same document and it doesn’t need high skills to run. As an example on using whiteboard, I used math to explain logical operators for selection based on condition.
- Interactive Drawings and Videos: In order to explain repetition, I used the .gif image below. I asked the students to do push-ups for one minute, then they have to write the number they achieved in the chat. This was great practice! they played sport, they were competing and they had great fun.
Programming
In each course I work with the same group, doing this enabled me to give them a full training. I found it more useful than separate workshops for different groups. The Python course was seven sessions, each session is about 90 minutes. I followed an outline similar to the Raspberry Pi guide. I start the session using warmups like the ones I discussed earlier (Sport, drawing, Sudoku Challenge ..etc), explain the main programming concepts, start the associated project and let the children finish it with the challenges as a homework. It is very important to demonstrate to the children how to use all the platforms that you are using in the training.
- Session 1: Algorithms and Logical thinking.
- Session 2: How to use Github.
- Session 3: Variables.
- Session 4: Selection.
- Session 5: Repetition.
- Session 6: Lists.
- Session 7: Conditional Loop.
I used Trinket as our programming platform, most of the code I used for explaining is here. Every student create their account and they sent me the link to their finished project.
Celebrating Achievement
We did show casing for the students projects and for every project they finish successfully, we awarded them the certificate. Having the certificate motivated the students to finish as many projects as possible with great accuracy. Then when finishing the course they were awarded certificate of completion the course.
I'd love to hear about your experience and your thoughts about this blog. To get in touch, you can:
- Leave a comment
- Email: maysan.iq@coderdojo.com
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