Teach

For October’s InDay I had the opportunity to teach high school students how to code.  This was the first time I was mentoring/teaching someone who had no prior programming experience.

The goal of the lesson was to help the student build a simple guessing game (pick a random number and have the user try to guess it; let the user know if their guess is greater than or lesser than the random number) in Javascript. On the surface this seems like an easy task; but if you think about it it involves using quite a few programming constructs — variables, loops, conditionals, functions, random number generators, etc.

One method that I found useful while teaching was to introduce the programming concepts with the help of the mathematical concepts on which they are built. Variables and functions in programming languages are (more or less) based on the same constructs in mathematics and it was easy to draw parallels between the two.

To explain how to generate a random number within a range I used the Google Chrome Console to show how function composition in programming works.

Also, analogies help. “Why do we need HTML, CSS, and Javascript?” “Well, HTML elements are the basic building blocks of a webpage. CSS allows you to add color to and position the blocks — it makes the blocks look pretty. Javascript makes the blocks interactive.” Yes, I’m well aware that this analogy is not perfect, but it was the best I could come up with at the time and I think captures the essence of why we need this trio to build websites today.

Overall this was a challenging and rewarding experience. I need to find more volunteering opportunities that are coding related.