Syllabus for teaching Scratch programming to kids

https://learnawesome.org/items/1c96e03a-ffff-4579-b69a-0387b968b7c6-syllabus-scratch-programming-for-kids

by mathnmusic • 6 years ago

2 2 6 years ago

zzedd• 6 years ago

Preparing and orchestrating a syllabus for young learners is a very complex task. One lesson I learnt as a professional educator teaching programming to children was to design experiences around situations that were relevant and interesting to them. This guide is probably well-intentioned and locally successful, but the opening example appears misguided:

"... Suppose your boss wants you to work from 8am to 11am, and mop floors 8 to 11. Simple - it's one floor per hour, right?"

This appears irrelevant and uninteresting to the lived experiences of most children.

mathnmusic• 6 years ago

There is kind of a mania going on for teaching coding to kids - at least around me - fueled by the "edtech" industry.

Manipulative marketing and sales tactics to get parents to buy expensive courses which use nothing but MIT's free Scratch language (or nocode tools) combined with terrible instruction. This user on Twitter has been documenting some of these: https://twitter.com/whiteHatSnr

I find it very disturbing. For my 5yo kid, I had used many free resources such as Harvey Mudd College's free course on edX and more constrained apps like LightBot and found them to work spectacularly well. To help other parents, I wrote down this sequence in which these ideas can be introduced.

Disclaimer: LearnAwesome is my open-source project for lifelong learning to build syllabuses exactly like these.

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Look at the kind of ads these edtech companies - in which Mark Zuckerberg is an investor - have been using:

1: https://the-ken.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/whitehatjr-97...

2: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EhLBJMYUMAE3C2a?format=jpg&name=...

Syllabus for teaching Scratch programming to kids

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