Learning Activity Projects for the First HackathonHere are three projects around building learning activities. I would like us to make progress on at least one of them in our first hackathon.
If you are excited and ready to start building activites now, take a look at the HTML pages on activity.pencilcode.net - when an activity is done, it should be written up as a set of worksheets that are concise, readable, and easily printable for classroom use. Curricula The goal is to build a set of Pencil Code projects over time that can be used in a standard curriculum. For inspiration, read the new-generation computer science high school course curricula here. Use of Programming In Humanities We believe it is important for kids to see that programming is useful as a tool in non-stem fields. There are two major applications that are accessible to kids who are studying history or English or art:
This is a goal targeted at high-school age kids who are ready for "real world applications" - the more real the better. And yet things must be easy enough to be rewarding. Goals:
Loops A very common problem when teaching kids to program is that they do not naturally ask to use control flow. For example, the program here is typical, even for a "superstar" beginner: We need lots of activities that make simple loops as inviting and interesting as possible, to nudge kids to using loops. Goals:
Recursion Learning about functions, local variables, and recursion is the "big hurdle" for many students. We need high-quality activities that look at recursion from a beginner's point of view in several different ways. Some students will be able to understand recursion operationally (step-by-step); others will think about it functionally (as a decomposition). Some students will have an easier time with math examples (like factorials or fibonacci numbers), and others will prefer graphical examples (spirals and fractals). Goals:
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