Attention - all teachers in this forum

General
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A growing number of teachers are using Codea to teach programming.

Although I’m not a teacher myself, I think it would be very helpful for all of you to share ideas, problems, course materials etc, because teaching programming is not easy, and Codea doesn’t come with lots of great tutorials designed specially for students of different ages.

So if you are a teacher, please reply to this message, and use this thread to talk about any teaching related topics with each other. When you reply, I suggest you include where you’re from, what grade you are teaching, how you are using Codea, and (if you are prepared to share) your ideas on how to teach it, and links to course materials.

Also, if you can clearly identify what sort of material would be most useful in teaching, I (and I’m sure others on the forum) will help in providing it.

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i am not a teacher but ur idea is great

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Hello

I am a computer science teacher in the second stage of secondary school (Belgium). I use Codea to learn the students to program. Super application!

Questions:
→ How teach you Codea?
→ Course materials?
I’m searching step by step projects for children, the step by step projects on the wiki page are to difficult…
I make a book for Codea for children with exercices, but it’s so difficult to begin! They know nothing of programming…
It’s also an experiment…

Thanks.

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Can we keep a place in the wiki or somewhere like that where people can upload worked examples of code which take you through each step using comments or videos, I really think these would benefit newcomers and make great resources for teachers

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Not a teacher, I was a student at a Codea camp though.

They taught us by starting the basics, drawing a sprite on the screen, then they showed us a automatic way to change the sprites position: x=x+1.

After they showed us the basics (functions, variables, if statements, and the touch functions) then they challenged us, with no help, to make a whack a mole game.

At the end of the week, they gave us two days to make a finished app, but since most peoples ideas were complex, they decided to help us out.

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@Luatee: “Can we keep a place in the wiki or somewhere like that where people can upload worked examples of code which take you through each step using comments or videos”

What, like the list of tutorials provided on the front page of the wiki?..

https://bitbucket.org/TwoLivesLeft/core/wiki/Home

Including ones aimed at beginners:
5 introductory tutorials under the Getting started…1. Tutorials link
22 tutorials aimed at Kids under the Getting started…2. ForKids link
and
Step by step projects aimed at absolute beginners under the Getting started…6. Step by Step projects link

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@AnnSophie

Have you tried my/@ignatz lunar lander?
http://www.twolivesleft.com/Codea/Talk/discussion/2941/my-first-game-a-tutorial-for-absolute-beginners/p1
http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/Talk/discussion/comment/28705

or asteroids?
https://gist.github.com/Westenburg/6487497

The first step of both these projects is to display a sprite on the screen - is this too difficult for your students?

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I think she said it was too hard (mine too). If they don’t know any Lua, everything is too hard, though.

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@West not tutorials as such but just codes which are documented as needed for the user to understand what’s going on, so once a beginner learns the syntax they can easily adapt ideas and learn from the worked examples

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@Ignatz - yeah, that was going to be my point. If you don’t understand:

sprite("Space Art:Red Ship",100,100)

Then providing a simpler coding example is not going to help. In this case I’d imagine time would be needed to explain what programming is.

@Luatee - ok I misunderstood. Why don’t you just set up a page on the Wiki for this yourself?

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@West I suppose that would be better than asking for it, I’ll try and think of some and make a few to start it off, although I’m not the best teacher around