alice-teacher Teaching Alice to young children

[Susana (Suki) Wessling]

Hi everybody,

I wanted to introduce myself and let you know what I'm doing in case you have any insights for me.

I homeschool my two children, aged 7 and 11. I started homeschooling my son, 11, this year in part because I wanted him to have time to explore his passions, one of which is programming. He'd been using Scratch for a long time, so for variety we decided to form a club to learn Alice with other kids. I knew going in that he was going to be light-years ahead of the other kids, so I'm calling it a "club" and I'm only giving very open-ended assignments if I give them to the whole group. The group ranges from one other boy, 9, who has programming experience, down to one girl, 7, who has not used computers very much. Presently we're at 7 kids.

One of the things that I have been exploring as a former college English teacher and a homeschooler is that kids can be taught advanced concepts at a level that they understand, and having these advanced concepts actually helps them learn the basics that they haven't mastered yet. I follow this logic in teaching my 7-year-old math: she has never been interested in doing all the math facts work required at her age (she's officially doing 3rd grade math), but she loves concepts like working with prime numbers, tessellations, and she's obsessed with tesseracts! These interests give her inspiration to learn the "boring" stuff.

So far in our Alice club, I've been working on getting the novice users to learn all the tools and experiment with moving the objects in space. Last week I gave them an assignment to write a program in which the main method calls another method. (This was the point at which, unfortunately, two girls decided to drop out, so perhaps I may have pushed that too early for them!) The two with programming experience are working on creating worlds that they can interact with. I am planning to have my son attempt to rewrite some of the programs he's written in Scratch, because he's presently under the misimpression that Alice "can't do math stuff."

My question for all of you is whether you have suggestions for basic assignments I can give the kids to teach them the fundamentals of programming, without making the assignment too hard or more complex than they can understand. By having them create a method that is called by another method, for example, I was introducing the idea that pieces of code can be compartmentalized then reused. This is definitely not an obvious concept to a 7-year-old, but it is a concept that can help them in problem-solving in general.

I look forward to your input,

Suki
Susana (Suki) Wessling
SukiWessling.parentclickblogs.com | Examiner.com/gifted-children-in-national
Suki's Parenting and Education Facebook Page




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