Well, the journey has been quite stable. It’s been three days already out of the 3-week Bootcamp, and honestly, I’m impressed with how things have been.
On the second day of the boot camp, yesterday (14/08/2024), I met some of my students and asked about the nature of the class. I questioned them if it was boring or not. Most of them said and agreed that the class was boring 😕. In my head, I was already wondering, how did I get to this? I thought I was interesting and fun.
Wait wait wait… What did we do on that day again? Oh yeah, we looked at the history of the “languages” we’d be focusing on throughout the boot camp, and a little bit of how writing those languages would feel like. I was still trying to completely understand my students and how they behave and think so, I guess this first week has been dedicated to creating a good first impression on my students.
So today (15/08/2024), day three, I decided to instantly make corrections. I made sure I came prepared and in some form, overprepared for the classes. I checked out the homework I gave them (my beloved students 😂) and ensured they understood what they did.
My Students — Web Dev Beginners
From the homework, I was able to identify those with issues and clarify any problem they had. After doing that for a while, the classes began for the day. I was assigned the Basic Web Development class and as such, the students are expected to understand HTML and CSS, and for my goal, I want to ensure they understand both “languages” properly and are even able to defend certain opinions.
I plan to achieve this by using another model (just a method 😏) to give the learners some form of real-world experience while still learning. So, to achieve the objectives of today’s lessons, I told my students to choose an app that they’d want to clone. Some of them chose Instagram, some Whatsapp, and others Spotify and Youtube, among many other options.
And from their choices, I began teaching them about one of the most important parts of these platforms. Navigation. They were to learn how to use links, and the best way for them to learn is to actually use these “things”(links) in action. But before that, I taught them about lists, its types and how they work. Then I told them to create some form of a model of how those platforms they chose have their navigation links working.
Navigation on these projects they chose refers to the links that move you from page to page, or section to section.
Most of the students in the class were able to do as asked in one try. I was impressed, and the others who weren’t able to achieve this goal just needed some clarification and they were up and running.
I made sure I showed them how it worked interestingly too, not just by word of mouth. I used objects in the classroom and together with the power of their imagination, they were able to understand the concept I was trying to pass along.
So, we made the list of navigation items to take us to their respective pages, but we hadn’t made the links. I showed them a sample of how to make links, and most of them were quite calm and reserved with the idea. I related the <a> tag to the paragraph, <p> tag, and said, they were similar but instead of just plain text now, one was used for creating links. I also used the opportunity to explain attributes to them and I’m quite satisfied with how much they learnt for the day.
It’s a 3-week boot camp, and tomorrow(16/08/2024) would mark the end of the first week. At the end of this boot camp, the students are expected to move on to their next class with a strong knowledge of HTML and enough of CSS which they’d use to continue learning.
I’m making new changes every day to my teaching styles and looking at how they affect the pace and understanding rates of my students. I’m quite happy about this teaching opportunity because, It’s enabled me to do a revision on everything HTML and CSS because as I usually write more of ReactJS and NextJS, and also use TailwindCSS, I don’t really get to see HTML and CSS so much the way these beginner learners do. So, I’m quite grateful for the opportunity and I hope I’m able to deliver knowledge to these learners {so much joy 😅}.
Just in case, this is just a summary of how today’s class went. It’s not a direct step-by-step article on what happened, so, some parts may not be written because they are just about me telling the students to do something or their break time, or something else maybe. But don’t be worried. I won’t skip on the major experiences. Writing is one way I communicate with the world and I wouldn’t want to just remove details that are useful for some tiny reason {I’m writing about highlights of the day 😂}
My name is Samuel Urah Yahaya and this is a continuation of my new series, “Teaching at KCCA with SamY”. I urge you to follow me so you’d be notified when I post the next article and do like or give an applause to any of my articles you find interesting and mind-blowing {or just funny 😂}. You’ve read one article of mine, I’ll catch you in the next one.
Additional Links and Info:
Kids Code Club Africa — KCCA: https://www.kidscodeclubafrica.com/
The IDE I work with — Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/
Cristina Gottardi for providing the image used in creating the SamYfied head image