# What teaching coding to 300 middle schoolers taught me.


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:
1.  The students would daily watch a video tutorial and follow instructions in it
2.  They would then solve challenges curated by our team
3.  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!
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. 

## 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 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.

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