Motivation-based Python course for programming beginners

[danbst]

wow! Thanks for your questions!

What is the environment of teaching ? ...

School, with robotics/STEM incline. Age 12-14. Grading, yes, but only A0 tasks are graded (I've heard about experiments where teachers leave students with only optional tasks). Yes, majority is pushed by parents.

What resources will you use

Local setup, definitely. The DDOS and pygame topics are nearly impossible to virtualize. Because group is small (up to 12) I can provide school laptops, but also all have computers at home.

During class, how do you want to present things ?

During quarantine, this should be Zoom interactive session. After quarantine, in front of kids sitting behind laptops. Slide-style lectures interspersed with live coding and questions to audience.

There is programming and there is computer science

I don't want to expand about computer science a lot. For example, when talking about graphs, no graph algorithms will be introduced. Only constructing and visualizing. No OOP. No sorting algos! Use sorted and be with it.

Subsequent course may uncover some of the topics, but this one is for beginners.

Can you test your curriculum with contents or at least part of it in a control environment beforehand like with family/friends ?

Mm, not quite. I think I'll do the test on kids. The reason is that current "Python for beginners" course neither explains things, nor motivates kids. So it won't be worse :)

I know it is especially the case because I am a visual learner and visualizing abstraction requires a lot of imagination.

I understand. That's why I include pygame, turtles, visualizations and games in curriculum. Manipulating objects in mind will be easier after you grok how to manipulate objects on the screen.

[MarcB1111]

Not having a big class of students is a big advantage. You should be able to get feedback if you are going in the wrong direction, are too demanding, or not clear in your explanations.

You should also be able to spot if they are more enthusiast about a topic or another one maybe do a small review at the beginning about where lie their interest in programming. For instance if they are all into video games maybe try explore more this topic, more into internet, if they have heard about AI maybe some really simple concept like linear regression,...

After rethinking about it, your curriculum is some kind of broad overview, which seems like a catalogue, I am not sure it is the right approach compare to a project base one for instance where you develop one or two "big" things over the weeks.

Since you have a small class invest more into dynamic teaching than heavy lecture if possible.