Learn Programming with the Department of Fun Stuff

This three-day workshop is a gentle introduction to programming (sometimes referred to as the more mysterious sounding “coding”) for teachers with little or no prior experience. We’ll start from absolute basics, and gently introduce the idea of what programming is, what it looks like, and help you develop some basic skills in either the Scratch or Python programming languages. We’ll demystify the language of Computational Thinking, including ideas like “sequence”, “selection” and “iteration”, and explore what “debugging” looks like in a school context. The workshops will have breakout sessions for people who want to go at a faster or slower pace. And the main rule is that there are no silly questions – it’s a chance to explore in a safe environment. We’ll use examples that are relevant to our context in Aotearoa, and explore ideas that are relevant to the new and revised Digital Technologies curriculum content.

The course will be run by Tim Bell, who has been teaching programming for way longer than he’ll admit, but is particularly interested in first steps for beginners. He will be assisted by tutors from his CS Education Research group at Canterbury (also known as the department of fun stuff).

You’ll come away with resources and ideas to take back to your school to support other teachers as well as your learners.
The course is stand-alone, but it is also intended for people who are preparing to take the University of Canterbury EDEM665 course on how to teach programming. Completing this workshop (perhaps along with a little homework) will get you up to the level needed to make sense of the course.

Monday 13 January, 2020

Tuesday 14 January, 2020

Wednesday 15 January, 2020