After Class

I finished the first class 1.5 hours ago and it went pretty well. There were 6 boys in the class 3 from 6th grade, 3 from 5th. It was a mix of kids with different backgrounds - including three Ethiopian boys. They are supposed to be from the brightest kids and I was indeed surprised at how quickly they picked up some of the ideas. I will post the actual class material and some resource links later but for now I will give a brief summary.

The class went for about 1 hour and 45 minutes and I was worried in the beginning if I had enough material to go that long. It turns out I had more than enough. I intended the class to be a brief introduction to computer concepts. I knew the kids were familiar with terms such as "programs", "giga", "digital", "mp3" so I wanted to give them background here by explaining memory (bits, bytes, megabytes, ...), the binary system, digital vs. analog. I tried as much as possible to use the socratic method, always teaching concepts by first asking questions. This seemed to work very well as they were very animated and excited to answer questions. As I expected they knew these terms but had no knowledge of what they meant.

They came in very eager to learn. Their first question was whether I would teach them how to break into computers. I said no. I think they saw some kind of glamor in this although they had no idea what it meant other than general mischief. They immediately wanted access to the internet (I turned this off before I started). They knew PowerPoint, Word and Excel but knew little about what to do with them other than make pictures, change fonts, type long strings of characters, etc. I have seen this in my own children and with all children here in Israel. Computer Lab at this age is nothing more than Microsoft Office playtime. This might useful but I think more can be done with kids of this age. More Later.

Off to Class

I am about 10 minutes away from leaving to give my first class in programming to kids. I probably should have done this last night (or earlier) but the thought only came to me at the last minute - which is typical for me - that if I want to blog about the class and share hopefully useful information about teaching comuters to kids I probably should start before my first class. I will use this post to tell a little about me and what I am thinking as I go off into the unknown.

I am 38 years old and have been living in Israel for the last 8 years. I have worked on wall street and wall street systems for the last 10 years first as a programmer and now as a client facing biz guy. I have been thinking for a while that I want to volunteer to some kind of charity work but mostly because I am supremely lazy have not done anything until now. I didnt know what I wanted to do but decided a few months ago that as I know a little about programming and I like kids (usually) I would give and get the most value by teaching programming. I spoke to my sister in law who teaches english at a school with a fair mix of under priveledged to middle class kids about it. She set up an appointment with the principal, I told him what I was planning to do (maybe more on this later) and he set up a date for me to begin - which is today!

I really have to go so a little about what I am expecting. I don't know. I dont know what the kids' backgrounds are, how much they know about computers, whether I can teach, whether my broken Hebrew will be a barrier, whether I am prepared enough, whether I have interesting material for 5th - 6th graders. I dont know. But I will find out and let you know later.