Lorraine Bignell
Kingswood College, Melbourne, Australia
Tell us about yourself
I have been teaching Information Technology subjects for a number of years. I have taught Pascal, Basic, Visual Basic and C# but have never really felt that I had a really good grasp of any one language. I wanted my students to have a good background in the syntax of coding. I also wanted to be able to spend more time helping them to debug their programs as well as encouraging them to do their own debugging.
Tell us about your students
I had 14 students in a 10th grade class. Some students had done some programming at home themselves and others had never done any programming before.
Has CodeHS been an effective teaching tool for you? How so?
I felt that CodeHS was an effective teaching tool for me as the students seemed to learn more about the structure and syntax of coding in a shorter period of time than they would otherwise have done. I think that the students enjoyed having more control over their learning.
“Students enjoyed having more control over their learning.”
What does a typical day in your classroom look like?
Most students would immediately begin working on their coding as soon as they entered the classroom. I was able to easily monitor how students were going and help them with their problems.
What’s the funniest thing that’s happened in your CodeHS class?
Some students enjoyed being able to program Karel to do multiple cartwheels when a program was successful.
Originally published at codehs.com.
