[Events] On teaching programming classes for children

[Lukas Blakk]

I find this to be an invaluable break down of a day-long workshop curriculum and it's inspiring to me to level up from my current 1-4 hour workshops I've created.

Interesting point about the typing speed.  Even with some 12-14 year olds, typing seems to be rather onerous.  I'll give this workshop a try though at the nearest opportunity and see what I can glean from real-world experience.

-Lukas

On Aug 20, 2013, at 8:34 PM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/08/so-you-want-to-run-a-young-coders-class.html
> 
> Raspberry Pi slides: https://github.com/mechanicalgirl/young-coders-tutorial
> 
> An interesting point of view. For instance, this author (Katie
> Cunningham) suggests *not* charging for the workshop, and says "I don’t
> recommend opening up the sign-up any sooner than two weeks beforehand.
> Trust me, you will not have any trouble finding students. If you open it
> up too far in advance, though, you stand a higher chance of no shows."
> She prefers not to teach children under the age of 12:
> 
> "Why? Typing speed.
> 
> "No matter how smart a kid is, no matter mature, if they can’t type
> quickly, they will fall behind. If I have to wait for a small child to
> hunt and peck, the older students get bored and distracted. Also, hunt
> and peck seems to lead to more typos, which are harder for younger
> children to catch because they’re not terribly fast at scanning a screen
> of text."
> -- 
> Sumana Harihareswara
> Engineering Community Manager
> Wikimedia Foundation
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