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A Discovered Passion in Teaching - Part 2

—— A precious experience as a kids' programming teacher

Mar. 2020 - Present

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The motivation

When we saw the success of the online science experiment course, my business partner - Lily, and I decided to exploit more online STEM courses. Given my computer science background, she suggested I develop a series of programming courses for young students who have no coding basics. But some problems came up to my mind.

Honestly, learning to code is boring!

Teaching children programming is pretty challenging for me. Because I know my undergraduate program in software engineering is frustrating and stressful. I believe everyone who has worked in the IT industry can teach coding, but teaching children is totally a different thing!

Without a good pedagogy, students very easily lost interest in coding, this will be a disaster for children even their parents. Considering its difficulty, choosing a good programming platform for children seems extremely important.

Why I chose Swift Playground as my teaching platform?

Swift Playground is a gamified educational programming tool on iPads and Macs developed by Apple.

It likes a puzzle game, students need to use code to control monsters finishing specific tasks such as collecting gems, toggling switches, teleporting through portals, etc.

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Pros and Cons of Swift Playground

Interface

  • 3D game-like interface, specially friendly to young children;

  • Since it originally came out from iPad, students can code just by touching and dragging; 

Content

  • Challenges of puzzles are scaffolded with appropriate hints;

  • Offer comprehensive course from beginner to advanced level;

Support

  • Apple also provides a detailed student and teaching guide of using Playground;

  • Support multiple languages and totally free on iPad or Mac platform.

Coding Language Limitation

  • It’s based on Swift, most of parents refused to use it because of that;

  • The platform is limited to Apple devices;

Typing Limitation

  • Even students can code through touching and dragging commands, it requires some typing skills as well. For some kids, it may be little bit difficult to type down code;

Gamified Content Limitation

  • Young students may focus on the gamified 3D puzzles, rather than learning coding itself.

Why we didn’t choose Scratch?

Scratch is the other world-known educational programming platform, the coding interface is block-based, students can click and drag blocks of commands on the screen to build a whole program just like Lego.

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Environment

Coding Content

Platform Popularity

Online Course Volume

  • Based on browser

  • Block-based

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  • Based on iPad or Mac

  • Real code based

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Even though Scratch is more popular than Playground, there are tons of the competitive online Scratch courses on the market. Under this circumstances, we decided to use Playground as the teaching platform.

In Aug. 2020 to late 2021, I have taught more than 100 students from the age of 7 to 14 over 300 hours, designed and implemented a systematically beginner-level curriculum.

Course Target

7 - 14

Duration

mid 20 - Present

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Num. of Students

100+

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Num. of Hours

300+

I have been praised numerous times because of my strong sense of responsibility to every student I taught in programming classes. Meanwhile, I monitored every student’s homework and provided feedback of their learning progress to parents. Until now, I still consider these compliments as my biggest achievement in teaching career.

Here is the example of curriculum

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1.

Commands

  • Learn basics about computers, commands, information and data.

2.

Functions

  • Learn functions from our daily life, understand the coding logics of program.

3.

For-loops

  • Discover for-loop in daily routine, design islamic art to understand the concept of loop, practice for-loop coding.

4.

Nesting Loops

  • Get deeply insight of for-loop.

5.

Variables

  • Familiar with different data types through DIY ID card, learn how to use variables.

6.

String

  • Understand concepts of string mutability and concatenating.

7.

Conditional Code #1

  • Learn how to draw flow chart, understand the meaning of if-statement.

8.

Conditional Code #2

  • Can tell difference between else if and else, practice complicated coding.

9.

Binary #1

  • Learn Binary from card game, compare binary with decimal system.

10.

Binary #2

  • Understand how to calculate binary addition.

11.

App Design

  • Get some hints of software development cycle, use balsamiq mockups to design low-fi user interface.

12.

Logical Operators

  • Learn Venn diagram, practice coding using boolean values.

13.

While-loop #1

  • Compare while-loop and for-loop through coloring flowers.

14.

While-loop #2

  • Practice nested while-loop structure.

15.

Type & Initialization

  • Understand the concept of initialization and dot.notation.

16.

Parameters #1

  • Practice functions with single parameter.

17.

Parameters #2

  • Practice functions with multiple parameters.

18.

Algorithms

  • Get a generalized understanding of algorithms, learn right-hand rule through some maze-drawing activities.

19.

Array #1

  • Discover the concept of array in our daily life.

20.

Array #2

  • Practice how to iterate the array.

And more ...

The motivation

As the <Introduction to Programming> course has been widely acknowledged by many parents, some of them specially asked me whether I have intentions to teach Python. After inquiring about several parents’ needs, I summarized some characteristics.

Most parents who want their children to learn Python are working in IT industry, they are programmers, data scientists, from medium or big-size companies. In their opinion, children must learn programming, it helps children develop logical thinking and a mathematical mindset. They prefer Python rather than other languages because they know how versatile it is and it has been widely used in many environments.

Working at Industry

High-educated

These parents with high educational backgrounds usually teach their children some programming basis such as function and loop, through daily life. These children already have some insights into computers and coding.

Quality is Important

Given these parents' professional settings, they would pay more attention to the course quality and teacher’s personality than the price.

Course Overview

Considering all situations, I made the Python course a private 1-on-1 class, each session lasting 1 hour. The price is triple higher than the Playground class.

Until now, I have designed and implemented over 600-page teaching slides along with more than 50 unique student homework.

Course Target

10y+

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Course Size

1 on 1

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Duration

Since Jan. 20th

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Num. of Slides

600+

Num. of Homework

50+

What challenges did I meet in teaching Python?

Even though this course is aimed at students 10 years old or older, without immersive learning platforms such as Playground or Scratch, students could easily lose interest. Letting students pay attention to a one-hour Python class while facing Python IDLE is my biggest challenge in this course.

The solution - telling stories

My students are children and every child cannot resist stories, my secret is telling stories.

Example #1

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In condition code class, I wrote a small simple text game about the ancient Greek Sphinx riddles and demonstrated it to my students. None of them didn’t like it.

I teach them how to build their own riddle game step by step through learning if statement structure.

Example #2

In while loop class, I just made up another story, students must be brave warriors to rescue Sleeping Beauty. The warrior should answer Maleficent’s question, if the answer is correct, she will release Beauty.

The solution - elaborate slides

With my UX design background, my teaching slides stand out among most teachers. People don’t read, I deliberately designed all slides concisely and colorfully, even if it took me tons of time. After the class, students can review the knowledge using slides comprehensively as quickly as possible.

Example: Pascal Triangle

Here is the example of curriculum

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1.

Welcome to Python

  • Deploy Python development environment, get some insights of different programming language used for.

2.

Variables and Strings

  • Understand variables, formatted string literals, multiline strings and string concatenation.

3.

Arithmetic and Logic Operators

  • Get familiar with modulus and floor division. Correctly use comparison operators, review logical operators.

4.

Introduction to Lists

  • Introduce concepts of list. Practice list slicing, list mutation and membership operators.

5.

Lists and Tuples

  • Learn how to modify a list. Can tell difference between tuples and lists. Understand RGB color model and color gamut.

6.

Conditional Code

  • Understand conditional code. Program a simple text game with nested if-statement structure.

7.

For Loop

  • Review the concept of for loop, introduce range() method.

8.

Fibonacci Sequence

  • Discover and program the Fibonacci sequence. Learn how to iterate list in for loop.

9.

Nested Loop

  • Practice loop over the list. Introduce nested loop.

10.

Introduce to Turtle

  • Introduce turtle module, design a simple turtle graphic.

11.

Turtle with For Loop

  • Program some complex graphics such as spiral polygon, star shapes and rotated circles.

12.

Write in Turtle

  • Learn how to use write() method in turtle module. Understand typographic.

13.

“Show Time!”

  • Program a digital clock with turtle, time and datetime modules.

14.

Stamp in Turtle

  • Understand stamp(), up() methods. Design a spiral turtle graphic with random RGB colors.

15.

Functions with Parameters

  • Practice declaring some functions with multiple parameters.

16.

Functions with Return

  • Understand return in functions. Program a function that can be used for calculating factorial.

17.

Comprehensive Practice #1

  • Program a time zone converter.

18.

While Loop

  • Learn while loop with two simple text games. Understand the concepts of binary search.

19.

Comprehensive Practice #2

  • Program a dice rolling project and a rainbow turtle project with multiple functions.

20.

Prime Numbers

  • Learn how to code a program to find prime numbers in limited range.

21.

Armstrong Numbers

  • Program a function to check a number if it’s the Armstrong number.

22.

Dictionaries

  • Understand the concept of dictionary in Python and how to modify dictionaries.

23.

Loop Over the Dictionary

  • Learn how to iterate dictionaries.

24.

Frequency Question

  • Program a function to check the most frequency letter in a random string.

25.

File Handling

  • Understand file extension. Create, edit a simple text file.

26.

File & Dictionary

  • Practice files and dictionaries through two projects.

27.

Sets

  • Create and modify sets. Program a function to check a number if it’s pangram or not.

28.

Matrix

  • Understand the matrix. Program a function used for calculating matrix addition or subtraction. 

29.

Pascal’s Triangle

  • Get some insights of Pascal’s triangle. Learn how to program that triangle in Python.

30.

Tower of Hanoi

  • Understand the concept of recursion. Program a mathematical puzzle - Tower of Hanoi.

And more ...

Quanpeng Wu 2022

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