Hey 👋!
Real Quick: In case you come across this article while surfing the internet, I am writing this series of articles to share my experience teaching kids at Kids Code Club Africa (KCCA) how to code, and this is the first one.
Let’s go!
KCCA — Kids Code Club Africa, is an initiative of the Alpha Blue Foundation, dedicated to empowering African children with digital and entrepreneurial skills, and this year, I was offered to be an instructor at the yearly boot camp.
This is a compilation story for day one and day two, but on the other coming days, I will write as soon as the classes are over.
Due to the #endbadgovernance protest here in Nigeria, the 5-week boot camp was truncated to 3 and day one had just begun on the 13th of August, 2024. I initially wanted to have separate articles for day one and day two, but I just had to combine them. I was a little bit overwhelmed with different activities so I missed the article on day one, but we’re here now.
DAY ONE
Day one was the day when things changed for me. I was no longer a student, but now an instructor (or teacher). Yeah, the whole feeling was and is crazy. It’s not like I stopped learning but now, I pass down my acquired knowledge to the next generation.
Flashback: The previous day was the opening and swearing-in ceremony of the new intakes into the boot camp. Don’t worry, the swearing-in ceremony is only composed of a collection of speeches and presentations from different past students and an oath-taking session of the new intakes to never use technology as a weapon or for crime but for the general good of society. This was an amazing day and event. I was and am glad I didn’t miss it.
So… as the day broke into the first day of the KCCA boot camp, I woke up with joy, and of course, some tension in my heart also. It was going to be my first time teaching. Not like I hadn’t done it before, it was just the fact that I’d be speaking to young teenagers about programming. But public speaking is no issue to me. I usually make presentations in my school during some of our classes, and through that, I’ve been able to gain the confidence and self-esteem needed to pass on information.
When I arrived, some of my students were already in the designated class for the lessons with their laptops already turned on and their faces already beaming with emotions. The idea then settled about me being the one to imbibe knowledge and character in my new students. As a tradition for me, I usually use day one to run setup and explain any terms that would be constantly used in throughout the lessons.
I was assigned to teach the Beginner Web Development class and it’s been quite an experience. In the beginner web dev class, it’s our duty as the instructor to pass on to the learners the basics needed to thrive and survive in the developer world. One of my most common ideals is that basics form everything. It’s just basic ideas put together that make anything what it is, no matter how advanced. There are always basics.
So, I taught these young learners how to install my favourite and quite renowned workstation or IDE (Integrated Development Environment), Visual Studio Code. I made sure they installed it properly (the way that makes life and work easy) and also, made sure they understood the process. After the installations were done, I went through Web Development History with them. Throughout the 3-week boot camp, the students ought to learn HTML, and CSS and be able to build proper projects with their skills. So, I started with the acronyms, HTML and CSS, and also went just a little bit into the history of HTML.
I plan that the Bootcamp would be to understand HTML well(at least 80% of the class population), then move to CSS. I’ve understood that students in general usually skip the basics at times, just to quickly go on to building massive projects. But little do they know that those basics put together make it so much easier to understand and develop these projects, that are thought of to be large and difficult to create.
So, at Day one’s completion we had installed our development environment and already looked at some basic history. My students are and have been quite cooperative, with obedience and paying attention, I hope they continue to keep it up. It’s quite sad I don’t have any pictures of the class right now, but hopefully, there will be pictures in the subsequent articles.
DAY TWO
Mentally, I aim to use a very interactive model to teach the students (not an AI model, just a method). I’d use a relatively moderate speech rate and together with coordinated hand movements, and graphics to capture the learner’s attention, I believe my students, by God’s grace, would be able to learn and understand. I throw in questions at most times and I try to repeat information that are essential for comprehension of the basics.
Today, Day TWO (14th August 2024), we looked more into HTML and how it actually is… We also looked at the naming conventions used in writing HTML, we looked at the basic tags used in writing texts, headers, and paragraph tags. I also just took the time to explain shortcuts in VS Code that help save time and make it easier to work. Not just that but I’m pretty convinced that my students understand the difference between the heading tags (h1 to h6). Yeah, it may seem easy but usually, I’d take it up a notch just to make sure we also complete our objectives for the training period.
As the class ended, I gave the students a quick exercise and I saw that most of them were able to complete it correctly and those who were unable to do it, I just re-explained and they were on track. With their completion of the exercise, I gave them an exercise to take home so I could see if they understood what we were doing.
I’ve been enjoying my classes actually and hopefully, I’ll be giving more updates and pictures of the SamY experience. My main goal for this boot camp is to inculcate the right knowledge and skills needed to advance to the next stage of their learning journey so that when I’m not there, they’d be happy for learning the basics and not cursing their teacher for doing badly with it.
I’m quite happy with the progress I’ve seen and I hope I’ll be able to keep it up. My name is Samuel Urah Yahaya and this marks the beginning of a new series, “Teaching at KCCA with SamY”.
It would be nice for you to follow me so you’d be notified when I post the next article and do like or give an applause or more to any of my articles you find captivating and interesting. Thanks for reading this article, I’ll catch you in the next one.
Appreciation: Cristina Gottardi for providing the image used in creating the SamYfied head image