I am starting a web development after school club at my local primary school (St Marks, Hadlow Down, East Sussex) on 3rd November 2011, with weekly 1 hour lessons after school on a Thursday (which apparently clashes with baton twirling club). There are 10 pupils (if they all turn up) in years 5-6 (9-11 years old). Classes are one hour (though that really turns out to be 50 minutes by the time they have settled down and got the computers booted).
I intend to keep this repo up to date with lesson plans, a record of how the lesson went, what I would have done differently etc.
I am not a teacher, and not even a good web developer, so feel free to comment / fork / make pull requests etc.
All the lessons are in the lessons folder, with observations about how they went in a sub-folder called reactions.
After the introductory lessons there is a project, to build a wish-list page. This needs a simple present list server (this one has no security or privacy) or if you have some knowledge of node, git, heroku and mongodb you can deploy your own for free as follows:
- Clone this repo
- Create a mongo collection database (I used MongoHQ) and set up environment variables
- Create a heroku app and set up environment variables WDKS2_HOST, WDKS2_PORT, WDKS2_DBNAME, WDKS2_USERNAME, WDKS2_PASSWORD
- Make your changes if required (and submit pull requests, if appropriate)
- Push to heroku
Mark
Other useful resources relating to web development lessons I have discovered:
- http://fingswotidun.com/javascript/ aimed at 9-11 year olds
- For slightly older groups of kids also covering web development at blackheathcoding.posterous.com (who kindly allowed me to use their material about links for lesson 6).
- Open University Javascript as first language course
- John Resig blog post about teaching Javascript as a first language
- Some Mozilla material here
If you want to teach kids but not necessarily web development, a good starting point is Emma Mulqueeny’s article here