Teaching Python Online to Primary Students

Gifted Online - Tasmania

• Funded by Dept of Education, delivered by teachers with time release.

• Classroom teachers nominated gifted students.

• Students have ‘support person’ in their school. Could be done via class.

Australian Curriculum mandates coding K-8. Few primary schools are in a position to teach it.

Highly gifted kids bored and problematic in classrooms. Teacher may not realize that they are gifted.

Equity. Students learning at home. Those without social/family connections are disadvantaged.

CodeXX - online version of scratch.

Courses dominated by boys. Students picked by teachers. Teachers likely to pick problematic students, who were more likely to be boys. Girls also likely to be bored, but show it in a different way. Solution: Course for girls. Force teachers to pick girls.

grok learning

Challanges:

• Get more girls enrolled in Python.

• Getting the right students into the courses. Teachers aren’t good at picking the right students.

• Student Resilicence.

• Code quality. Poor quality code can be accepted by grok. Students want to continue, not revise old work.

• Communication an issue with online teaching.

• Sufficient access. 1 hour per week is not enough. In practise 1 hour is reduced or missed frequently. Successful kids continue in their own time.