Teaching Day 2 - post arctic blast
A teacher's institute day and a cold weather day with no classes and three weeks have passed. It's probably a bit too much to expect kids to remember anything. So we started again.
Boys are still squirrels and girls are quiet rule followers. This is an after school activity; kids are a little wound up. They still have to take turns, mind their business and be good classroom citizens. Clearly, that's difficult. Our class is 2nd graders to 6th graders. We split into two groups. I've got the little ones - 2nd and 3rd graders. They have trouble clicking in small spaces and finding letters on the keyboard.
Today, the curriculum tried to introduce a looping construct (repeat a set of instructions over and over) and more debugging (here's a program; there's something wrong with it - fix it). Tall order. I can see some deficiencies with the program for little hands. If they move some of the blocks too far out of the way, it behaves in an unexpected fashion - we all know how much fun that is when the program doesn't behave correctly.
Our programming language essentially allows you to move your character around the screen (turn left, turn right, move forward, pick the thing up. When kids want some help I've suggested that they act out the actions rather than typing into the screen. It's very gratifying to see them using that technique to problem solve when I'm not helping them. I'm thinking now how we could do a group exercise to demonstrating looping. I think that might remove the hardness and help them learn the concept.
The class is a 1-hr after school specials thing. It's mostly getting them setup and letting them go. I see little hints on actual teaching. I can see how this could become a passion. How I could get wrapped up in figuring out the right way to teach something. I'd love to go do that same thing again tomorrow and do it better.
Boys are still squirrels and girls are quiet rule followers. This is an after school activity; kids are a little wound up. They still have to take turns, mind their business and be good classroom citizens. Clearly, that's difficult. Our class is 2nd graders to 6th graders. We split into two groups. I've got the little ones - 2nd and 3rd graders. They have trouble clicking in small spaces and finding letters on the keyboard.
Today, the curriculum tried to introduce a looping construct (repeat a set of instructions over and over) and more debugging (here's a program; there's something wrong with it - fix it). Tall order. I can see some deficiencies with the program for little hands. If they move some of the blocks too far out of the way, it behaves in an unexpected fashion - we all know how much fun that is when the program doesn't behave correctly.
Our programming language essentially allows you to move your character around the screen (turn left, turn right, move forward, pick the thing up. When kids want some help I've suggested that they act out the actions rather than typing into the screen. It's very gratifying to see them using that technique to problem solve when I'm not helping them. I'm thinking now how we could do a group exercise to demonstrating looping. I think that might remove the hardness and help them learn the concept.
The class is a 1-hr after school specials thing. It's mostly getting them setup and letting them go. I see little hints on actual teaching. I can see how this could become a passion. How I could get wrapped up in figuring out the right way to teach something. I'd love to go do that same thing again tomorrow and do it better.
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