Teaching Other People Programming

Name
Email
Subject
Comment *
File	Select/drop/paste files here
* = required field	[▶ Show post options & limits] Confused? See the FAQ.

File: 1433676237812.jpg (65.55 KB, 800x600, 4:3, 1331798897_Juan_Martin_818….jpg)

Teaching Other People Programming Scholar 06/07/15 (Sun) 11:23:57 No.399

Hi /edu/ , I'm teaching a group of students how to program. Each student has something that they are learning for, including game and website creation. If anybody has any tips on teaching, I would appreciate it. They are also using 'CodeAcademy' on the side, but they're not very motivated and a couple of the students are not very intelligent.

At the moment we are writing Python, I chose this language because it is extremely simple, and it makes explaining the patterns and features in programming really easy. We are going to move into C#, because of it's use in Unity, or Actionscript 3, because some students need to learn it for their ICT class. If anyone has any better ideas, I would appreciate that as well.

Thanks.

Scholar 06/09/15 (Tue) 13:52:38 No.400

File: 1433857958601.jpg (900.28 KB, 709x4787, 709:4787, 1379669916026.jpg)

Be sure to give them plenty of examples and exercises. Don't just show them the examples, but let them play with it and some of the exercises should be based on the examples (changing it and such).

Good luck!

Scholar 06/09/15 (Tue) 18:21:08 No.401

Codecamy is honestly not a very good resource, especially for someone with prior programming experience.

Scholar 06/13/15 (Sat) 04:18:35 No.407

>>401

Then what would be? It is rude to just disagree yet not even provide an alternative.

Scholar 06/16/15 (Tue) 18:51:47 No.408

File: 1434480707763.jpg (397.75 KB, 1920x1080, 16:9, 1414903504762.jpg)

>>407

I guess you need it for exercises?

The easiest would be to find a textbook online and use its exercises. Sadly I don't know any for Python.

Another good way is searching for university courses and using their exercises, like these:

http://www.ling.gu.se/~lager/python_exercises.html

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-189-a-gentle-introduction-to-programming-using-python-january-iap-2011/assignments/

You could also get some ideas from this:

https://github.com/karan/Projects

Or maybe even pic. related?

Scholar 06/18/15 (Thu) 01:55:05 No.409

I find that too many prompts stifle learning significantly when learning how to program. That is probably Codecadamy's biggest problem. They just more or less tell you exactly how to do an exercise and nothing gets remembered.

The best thing to do is to show the students how to work the basics of the language and then set them off to try and work stuff out for themselves. Ask them to make simple apps, with perhaps minor prompts on specific lines of code they will need (eg.to find the index of an array) and just let them work the rest out for themselves. It takes time but people remember how to write code and more importantly how to problem solve.

Scholar 11/26/15 (Thu) 14:50:24 No.467

python + pygame for game creation

ruby + sinatra (or rails but it's heavier) + html/css for websites