| (Disclaimer: I work as an online Tutor for an Irish EduTech company which teaches children ages 8-18 to code via after-school and weekend classes.) This article has the right idea. Our style of teaching varies on the kids age. Younger kids (8-11) are treated much like school children, the teacher presents a topic, kids are given activities to do which they screenshare, then we work through them as a class. This is done in Scratch, mostly. As the kids get older we take a more hands-off approach, we have tonnes of exercises which take kids through Java via Processing. Learning variables by moving shapes, if statements by adding constraints to those moving shapes, collision detection by moving the mouse around and watching shapes change color as they collide, in the hopes to build their confidence to start building their own games. This is a highly adaptable form of teaching, although it's only really possible and practical as we have such small class sizes, allowing tutors like me to be able to spend ample time with teach student when issues arise. Younger students often have the enthusiasm, but they don't know where to guide it, this lends itself well to a lecture then activity format where there's at most a 7-8 minute period of "lecture" followed by an equal amount of activity time. The older kids often don't need the "lecture" part at all, rather we set them more and more challenging exercises and explain things individually as issues crop up, it allows them to use their own problem solving and initiative and we have seen some excellent programmers come through because of this (some of whom have began working with us as Tutors after they turned 18!) |