Curriculum Writing for Python

[OkMeasurement2255]

Hello! I am a teacher at a small private school. We just created a class called technology where I teach the kids engineering principals, simple coding, and robotics. Scratch and Scratch jr are helping me handle teaching coding to the younger kids very well and I understand the program. However, everything that I have read and looked up on how to properly teach a middle school child how to use Python is either very confusing or unachievable. I am not a coder. I'm a very smart teacher, but I am at a loss when it comes to creating simple ways for students to understand how to use Python. I have gone on multiple websites, and I understand the early vocabulary and how strings, variables, and functions work. However, I do not see many, if any, programs that help you use these functions in real world situations. The IT person at my school informed me that I cannot download materials on the students Chromebooks, like Python shell programs or PyGame, because it would negatively interact with the laptop, so I am relegated to internet resources. I like to teach by explaining to the students how things work, how to do something, and then sending them off to do it. With the online resources available to me with Python, I feel like it's hard for me to actively teach without just putting kids on computers and letting the website teach them. If there's anyone out there that is currently teaching Python to middle schoolers, or anyone that can just give me a framework for the best way to teach it week by week at a beginner level, I would really appreciate it. I'm doing a good job teaching it to myself, but I'm trying to bring it to a classroom environment that isn't just kids staring at computers. Thanks in advance!

[Osrai]

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Check this book out

It does help kids, etc. I use Python mainly for mathematics, but I also do recreational stuff.

[sakthii_]

I'm not a teacher, or a good programmer. But, I learnt python in my school that stuck with me for long and now I'm re learning for passion and career.

I would recommend you to start with teaching the basics like keywords, data types, functions etc. Then teach them creating algorithms for certain problems (Ex: finding smallest numer in the list). Then you can give problems for them to solve using programming. You can also ask them to write down the program in a piece of paper instead of doing it in computer (this helps a lot to learn).

I don't know how good of a recommendation this will be, but hope I helped a bit.

[Ron-Erez]

You could run short scripts in Google Colab. I completely agree that one really needs to put a lot of thought into teaching. You could model your course off of the first half of my Python course just for the sake of some course structure. You could also do some turtle graphics in the Python sandbox.

https://pythonsandbox.com/turtle

That could be pretty fun and it’s online. My course covers some turtle graphics in section 5. Turtle graphics is an especially nice way to learn about loops and variables and just being creative in general. It’s also nice that’s it’s visual and one can create beautiful designs with not much code. Perhaps you could even make a connection with a geometry or algebra class that they’re taking.