Introduction for Teachers¶

I created this site for use with my secondary school students. It started with resources and examples from other teachers, so I also present it for other teachers to use.

This site supports my classroom practice by addressing two issues:

• the wide range of coding experience students bring to this introductory unit
• students who miss lessons and need to catch up

My pedagogical approach is:

• Students are given the website and invited to work at their own pace.
  • This lets students race ahead if they wish.
  • The Extension Activities page links to more tutorials for students who finish early.
• I live code the content with the class.
  • This is the minimum progress I expect from students.
  • If they are behind what I'm doing in class, they need to catch up.
• If students fall behind, they can catch up using this site.

There are 12 lessons. Each lesson should take about one hour.

Videos¶

The videos on this site were made before the website, and before the lessons were renumbered. Their content is similar, but the site gives more detail. The videos use the old numbering:

Teacher resources¶

The source code for this site is on GitHub. The content is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and the code under GPLv3. You are free to download and reuse it within those licences.

• The tutorial files zip has every program and exercise starter, sorted into lesson folders.
• The Exercise Solutions page has a solution for every exercise.

Australian Curriculum¶

The content of this website addresses the following Australian Curriculum v9 Digital Technologies content descriptions.

Acknowledgements¶

The lessons that formed the backbone of this site were developed and generously shared by a community of Digital Technologies teachers from Queensland, Australia. I was first introduced to this work in a workshop by Steven Tucker.