Evolution of Project

When starting this project, all of us had little experience teaching young kids coding, so we figured that using a structured program that we could use as our foundation would be our best bet. This is how we decided on code.org. Code.org had multiple lesson plans, unique lessons that taught students the fundamentals of coding, and fun projects that the students could work on to demonstrate their knowledge. We chose the 2024 express course (grades 4 and 5), and figured we could line up each week with a lesson. These lessons included things like order of execution, boolean logic, for loops, while loops, if statements, and debugging.

In practice, it did not go as smoothly as we had hoped at the beginning. The kids had varying levels of skill and interest, so it was difficult to manage the classroom. Some kids were bored by the content, and would be unintentionally discouraging to the other students by expressing how easy it was. Some kids were not interested in coding at all, and would ask to do other activities during the time we spent with them. It was a tough task to try to help the kids that were genuinely interested while also trying to keep the other less interested kids focused throughout the time we shared with them.

As the semester progressed, we realized that the lessons were kind of boring and repetitive for the kids, and that we needed to add in some new elements so that the kids would have more fun with what we were doing. We would take a short break for games in the middle of the classes because it was a pretty long time for the kids to just be looking at a computer screen. Eventually, we realized that there were more free form activities on code.org, which would allow the kids to take what they had learned and do something a little more interesting and less structured. For the last couple of weeks of class, we had the kids play around with these projects, and in the final week, they shared their favorite creation. We thought it was a good way to end things off, and a good experience for the kids to explain their projects to the class.

Advice for Future Teams

Overall, if we were to do this project again, I think we would have tried to teach beyond that of the lessons of code.org because they were a little dull and uninspired. We wouldve tried to teach the students the concepts more at the beginning of class and have them work on a free form project that used these ideas, that way it wouldve been less of a drag for all of the students that were uninspired by the lessons code.org provided. It would have required a good amount of work though, creating lesson plans and examples to help the kids.

Our advice to future teams would be that the hardest part about teaching this class is managing the classroom. Some of the kids were very straightforward about how they felt, and it was tough because we wanted to help them. Also, the kids that we taught were sometimes very interested and hard working, but other times seemed to have no interest at all, so it was kind of hard working with them sometimes because we didnt know what to expect. We would also say to be as friendly with the kids as possible. We tried to be as reasonable as possible, since the kids were at school all day, so it made sense that sometimes they just wouldnt be in the mood to do more work. Overall though, we all enjoyed it, and hope that if another team does take over this project that they find it as meaningful and fulfilling as we did.