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Freelance technology journalist Alex Cruickshank continues from here. "One of the hardest aspects of teaching is
pitching the material at the right level. Although my daughter is one of
my students, she's not necessarily representative of the rest of the
class in terms of technical knowledge. I can't use her as a benchmark."
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| Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
So I have to make an educated guess about
how to present the information I'm teaching, since it's never been done
before in this school. I suppose that's why national curricula exist,
though they too have their drawbacks.
To begin the lesson I asked, "What is the
internet?" and got a range of interesting replies, most of which were
about the web rather than the internet. It's a difference that many
adults would fail to appreciate, but I tried to explain it in terms of
infrastructure: railway tracks and trains, that kind of thing.
Too abstract. So then I asked the children
to come up with a list of their favourite websites for next week. We'll
look at the source code for some of them, then move on to one of the
Codecademy web development courses. They're designed for adults, but
these children are fast learners and I think they'll be able to cope.
For the rest of the lesson we did some more Scratch work: inputs and
variables. Asking questions of the user, then using that information to
communicate. "What is your name?" "Hello , how are you?"
and suchlike. This piqued their interest, with some of the children
generating interactive conversations that were conditional upon the
previous answers: basic Scratch chat-bots.
Source: IDG Connect
