Teaching Scratch in Oslo's after-school programme
Six months as a kid-instructor with Lær Kidsa Koding's AKS programme. A setup where older students were trained up and then taught coding to fourth-graders in Oslo's Aktivitetsskole (the after-school programme of Oslo public schools). I was on the older end as a student, on the younger end as a teacher.
The programme
Lær Kidsa Koding (Norway's national "kids who code" organisation) ran four-week coding courses in Oslo's AKS, with the twist that the instructors were themselves school-age. They trained us in the curriculum, then sent us out to the AKS sites to run the sessions. Over the broader programme thousands of fourth-graders went through it.
- Curriculum. Scratch, the block-based language, introduced through small game projects rather than syntax drills.
- Pace. A course unit ran four weeks; I rotated through several over the half-year.
- Setting. Aktivitetsskolen, the relaxed, activity-driven afternoons at Oslo public schools. Not a classroom.
What I actually did
Helped a room full of fourth-graders make a sprite move across the screen and not lose interest before it got there. The real skill was reading the room: which kid was stuck on a typo, which one had quietly written something ambitious, which one needed a different example before the idea would land.
What I learned, teaching
You do not really know a thing until you have explained it badly to someone, watched the look of confusion, and tried again. Every "obvious" concept I held was someone else's first wall, and every wall had a different way through.
I have been suspicious of the word "obvious" in technical contexts ever since, and I think that suspicion is one of the more useful things I picked up from coding before I turned thirteen.