My Experience Teaching the "Hour of Code"

I recently had the opportunity to teach 8 middle school students at the Academy for Precision Learning in Seattle how to program using the "Hour of Code" tutorials and other course-ware at code.org.

If you haven't checked out what's going on at code.org recently, you really should.  Anna and Elsa make appearances in one Tutorial and they have just released a new tutorial entitled "Star Wars: Building a Galaxy with Code" just in time to capture the latest Star Wars craze. 

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Academy for Precision Learning (APL), it is an amazing K-12 private school in Seattle.  They have built a truly novel educational experience around the research at universities like the University of Washington that shows combining highly individualized precision learning techniques with an inclusion-oriented classroom comprised of a diverse group of peers ranging from gifted typically developing kids to some of the most impacted students with autism allows all students to progress faster, learn more and develop deeper awareness and empathy for others. 

We also took a few minutes each day to talk about application design, object oriented, functional programming, counting in binary... topics I didn't expect to cover with 12 year-olds, but they were craving more. 

It is really an amazing school with a model that works wonders for all their students.  To me, this is what "No Child Left Behind" was supposed to achieve and APL is proving it is possible.

But as a small private school of only 107 students, they don't yet have a dedicated Computer Science course at middle school or high school, so I volunteered along with a couple other parent volunteers to teach Computer Science from 8am-9am for one week to introduce the middle school kids to programming concepts.

All 8 of these students are doing great at APL, but each has struggled in different ways in public schools and range from typically developing to pretty severely impacted with autism.  For instance, at one point during the first day I asked a student a question and got no response at all.  Another students said "oh, just give him a minute" and sure enough a full 45 seconds later, he looked up and answered my question.  But that same student had no trouble working through the tutorials at the same speed as other kids and had a pretty cool moment at the end of the course where he did one activity that had a cat jumping and purring around the screen to the amusement of the rest of the class.  

One of the most inspiring (and challenging) aspects of teaching this class was that all 8 students had already done a fair amount of programming before arriving in the classroom.  Resources like Scratch and even availability of scripting languages like Python to JavaScript mean 12 year olds have far greater access to programming resources than when I was growing up.  One student had already built a fairly sophisticated game called Tomato War in Scratch with levels, shields, progressive difficulty and awards and another was building a text-based Adventure game in his spare time in Python at home. 

We started with Flappy Birds the first day just to get going, but I was glad to have access to the high school curriculum code.org is developing and many students made it through a bunch of Unit 1 during the week.  By the end of the week, I had let half the class into code.org's Beta AppLab as they were craving actually writing code. 

We also took a few minutes each day to talk about application design, object oriented, functional programming, counting in binary... topics I didn't expect to cover with 12 year-olds, but they were craving more. 

The best part of the whole week was when one student called me over to proudly show me that he had hacked a "Bob Saget easter egg" into his app.  Apparently Bob Saget still manages to inspire as much fascination with today's 12 year-olds as he did when I was 12.  

The programming tutorials and environments on code.org are truly amazing.  If you haven't signed up to volunteer to help teach the Hour of Code for their upcoming Computer Science Education Week, please do.   I'm excited to be teaching the course again for high school students at APL during that week of December 7th and can't wait to try the Star Wars Tutorial.