Coding Together

Watch this on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU1xS07N-FA

Goals of Coding Together Afterschool Program:

    1. Promote CS in Middle School: Attract middle school students to computer science with game design projects in Python that become an open source project. More about this strategy here.

    2. Extend Reach of CS Teachers: Make it possible for computer science teachers to teach in other schools' afterschool programs via blended learning. Also involve university programming students.

    3. Build Local Capacity for CS in High School: Organize MS students and families as advocates for CS courses in high school, and develop local capacity to teach coding via "site coordinators".

Bullet Points: http://goo.gl/wCWJxL

Structure of Proposed Pilot:

This is an "open source" curriculum in the making. Computer science teachers will co-develop the curriculum together and then apply it to settings they identify. The components:

    1. Two online meetings per week: "Presentation" Tuesday and "Code Workshop" Thursday.

    2. Franchise teachers provide instruction and guidance, fluent in coding, blended learning and project based learning, as well as online resources like Codecademy. Program personnel record presentations (Khan Academy style) that kick off Codeacademy-style sequences and projects.

    3. Students develop and submit code in teams, "open source" fashion. Team roles include coding, QA testing/debugging, and content development. Student teams submit versioned code and media to an online repository they will maintain, emulating open source projects.

    4. Course developers & support teachers design instructional projects aligned with redesigned Codecademy lessons (or other online coding lessons that can be modified to align with projects). This repository or projects and submitted code from courses evolves from site-level to program-wide, so that examples of "best practice" are linked to Codecademy-style lessons for study.

How We Will Code Together

    1. Start with collaborative planning. Moving from brainstorming to flowchart to pseudocode is accessible to many more students than diving straight into code is. Students can immediately participate in such conversations.

    2. Differentiate involvement levels. Students love developing adventure games, whether as coders or as content developers (e.g. dialogs and routines). Pairing coders and content developers can increase program participation, just as contributing documentation allows non-coders to participate in open source projects.

    3. Contribute to a code repository. Within a common development framework, team-developed and maintained functions (modules) for dungeon mazes, melees, and other encounters can be progressed through release versions. This code can be referenced as hyperlinked examples within Codecademy tutorials.

Who We Are

    • CodingTogether.us evolved as coding/gaming extension of Tech Scouts (http://hvscouts.com) first developed by Bram Moreinis for Central Park East Secondary School in 1996. Here's a radio program where middle school Tech Scouts were interviewed about learning to code:

Who We Need

    1. A Nonprofit Host: provide structure and supports to help MS students learn to code after school where schools lack computer science teachers, independent of local staff expertise & commitment. Funds needed for pilot: $10,000 - these can be shared between schools and nonprofit.

    2. 2 or more Spring Pilot Schools: run a pilot of the program for Spring, 2014 among schools, at least one of which in an urban minority setting.

    3. Computer Science Teachers willing to teach the course for $50/hour, or assist in the development of the curriculum until new sites can be found and funded.

    4. Local "site coordinators" with skilled CS teachers (via videoconferencing and other online interactions) to run afterschool courses with support from lead agency and online teachers.

  1. Student Python experts (college student coders and open source coders from UMass/Amherst) to workshop student-contributed code for $100/week.

Why Focus on Coding

Why Coding is Cool:

    • "[T]he number of United States students receiving bachelor’s degrees in computer science, and the percentage of high school students earnings credits in the field, are both on the decline — even though there will be 150,000 computing-job openings every year for the next seven years, by one estimate. Microsoft has gone so far as to send its engineers into high schools to help teach computer science.

More About the Tech Scouts

Other Student Help Desk programs include:

Articles: