What teaching coding to 300 middle schoolers taught me.

Search for a command to run...

I've attempted to teach people (adults) coding and noticed I move waaaaay too fast for people without prior knowledge. I had to slow it down massively to make it work.
Definitely can relate to this, did some teaching over the summer as well and it definitely took a lot of patience, but in the end it was a very humbling experience because of how eager the kids were to learn and how much growth I noticed from my own end
Was building game part of your curriculum? Because this how I got hook to programming, I wish I knew that early.
One last thing did you give the students the next steps to undertake from your initiation?
They had some experience with scratch to the thing I would teach them next would be Pygame - Zero.
Our team had given them a YouTube series for the same and we're still solving their doubts, you can try the same.
Some students have also tried to make apps using QT and Kivy.
The best thing that you can teach someone learning programming is that everything that you see is likely to be a line of code. However, there could be layer of complexity behind.
Pygame -Zero is not bad, frankly speaking I just heard of it.
Teaching is an awesome thing.. I enjoy doing it whenever gets an opportunity to do. Your points are just bang on.. Pratham Prasoon! Thanks for sharing.
Amazing post Pratham Prasoon! This is a great post for people who are gonna be teaching to code for the first time. I also learned all of this while mentoring students (special appreciation for the 5th point :D).
You did good work Pratham.
A year ago I was teaching programming to a junior in my college too. He was showing all signs of the middle schoolers you worked with.

A primer on factorials The '!' behind the 0, is notation for something called a 'factorial'. A factorial basically tells you to take the product of all integers and itself before it until you reach 1. If that didn't make any sense, take a look at thi...

Introduction A store owner recently noticed an alarmingly high rate of shoplifting. He develops a machine learning model that predicts if a customer has shoplifted or not and it is 95% accurate! He deploys the model but a month later catches no shop...

Before we understand how logarithms work, it is important to know how exponents work. aᶜ=b (read as "a to the power of c equals b") is an exponent where a,b and c are numbers. aᶜ=b just means that a multiplied by itself c amount of times is equal to ...

For this simple project we will use OpenCV in Python. It is a library using which we can develop real-time computer vision applications. It mainly focuses on image processing, video capture and analysis including features like face detection and ob...

What you are going to read below is a roadmap for the first 30 days of getting started with machine learning as a complete beginner. If you don't know how to code or anything about what machine learning is, then this blog post is for you. Step 1: Lea...

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.
That is why we decided to teach them in a way which most programmers learn:
Now here are my main takeaways:
Especially younger students require spoon-feeding at times. Resources which were given to them had to be boiled down enough for them to grasp it.
Basic things like knowing what is an integer, string, variable etc. are very important, otherwise programming at a later stage becomes very difficult.
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.
This also makes you more confident.
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
All went well and in the end we were able to help all the students to get a feel for what programming feels, 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 we achieved our goal very well.
Hope you found this post insightful. Have an awesome day, Cheers.
Pictures from: Unsplash