One typical way to teach programming is to show students a completely formed program and explain how it works. In such an approach, students are encouraged to perhaps modify some parts and observe the effects of their actions. This type of teaching sometimes misleads students into thinking they understand more than they do. Kodeclick’s philosophy, on the other hand, emphasizes design. In all our video lessons, students begin with an empty workspace (“a clean slate”) and incrementally build complex programs. Such an approach enables us to impart many practical lessons. First, by starting from an empty workspace each time, we reinforce that coding is not magic or otherwise incomprehensible. It significantly lowers the barriers (e.g., “stage fright”) that some kids and teens face when exposed to real programming environments. Second, real programmers develop programs in trial-and-error fashion: writing small pieces of code, testing them, noticing errors, fixing mistakes in code, and repeating. Our lessons echo this practice consistently and uniformly. By the time students complete our curriculum, such incremental program development is so ingrained in their coding practice that it becomes second nature to them. As a result, kodeclik students are not bogged down by program complexity and exhibit good reasoning and debugging skills. We have seen students build beyond our curriculum to create more complex creations, which has been a rewarding experience for us. Finally, the design approach emphasizes that coding is as much a creative activity as, say, building a train from Lego blocks by highlighting all the areas where a student can exercise their individual thinking. As a result, students feel more pride and ownership in their creations and this, in turn, fosters, more learning.
