My journey teaching kids has been full of amazing experiences, laughs and smiles. Today I´ll share with you how I have given coding classes to kids and how it has helped me to take the decision to change my career path to IT world since I felt passion about what I was doing. If this case sounds familiar to you or someone you know, you can find this really helpful.
I started giving classes to kids without knowing much more than pretty basic programming. At the very beginning what I needed was the simple desire to do it even when I was intimidated by the little experience in programming I had.
Some people helped me, but also, I spent some time studying, reading and making projects by my own; designing step by step how could I teach others on the functionality of computers and how can kids code.
Then I saw on YouTube a video about how to make a peanut butter jelly sandwich, it is about a parent that ask his kids to give him the instructions to make a peanut butter jelly sandwich. I truly believe that this is pure algorithmic thinking... a hard skill to build.
So, since I love algorithms, I brought bread and jelly to make this exercise with the kids and they loved it! There I was, with novice experience but loads of spirit teaching kids. I told them that computers are not intelligent, they thought I was lying, but then I explained them that we need to give specific instructions to the computer in order to make it do what we want, and with this exercise they understood the idea.
But not everything was theory, I found some valuable web pages that make the learning interactive:
Scratch
AppInverntor
Code.org
EPAM -the company I am working for- had Scratch sessions on the year so I joined them, and I realize that is something I love to do. And there I was, teaching software engineers how to make a Scratch project.
Many people ask me if kids are keen into programming, if kids pay attention to programming classes, if they don´t get bored easily. The answer is simple, they like to have your attention, they like to see they are achieving goals, so it is just about finding a way to do it.
Kids are curious and some of them are eager to learn new things but take this into consideration:
• They can get distracted easily if you are not clear with your instructions, I have found that they put a lot of effort to perform a clear task than in a task they don´t understand. They enjoy the feeling of doing something good.
• They prefer activities than theory, like the peanut butter and jelly sandwich instructions (I have done that even with teenagers and they love it too) When I gave a data structure class I used a line of people to represent an array and ways to sort it, finding that examples as easy as those can be very helpful.
• They like to play games, for this I schedule breaks every 30-60 mins to play, so they can rest a bit from a bunch of information and hard work.
• They can get frustrated if they don´t understand, sometimes it is a good idea to bring different project to them with different difficult levels.
If opening their minds to analytical thinking is something you would like to accomplish I suggest board games, I have found some on amazon that you can use:
Learning Resources Stem Robot Mouse Coding Activity Set
Think Fun Code Master Programming Logic Game
In addition to all the above, we designed our own board game and we played it on one session. We make paths and print arrows in ordernto set a path to get from start point to end point.
But the more important thing, you need to invest your time on them, I can assure you will have a good experience. Just remember this "If a kid can do it, why can´t we?"
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