Raspberry Pi, But Why?
What I have learned from Velocity’s first programming course
Over the past few months, I have been working with an organization called Velocity Indiana. They are an accelerator and co-working space in Southern Indiana, right outside of Louisville, KY. One of their goals for this year was to begin creating programming courses for students in the Kentuckiana area. They want to begin to shift the tide within the educational communities of Kentucky and Indiana in order to increase the number of opportunities for students to learn to code. Luckily, I have been able to work alongside Velocity to coordinate these course and help each new teacher plan their curriculum (which I, in turn, write for them).
The only course that I have not directly been a part of at Velocity is their very first class, a Raspberry Pi workshop. I have had the honor of visiting this class several times and I think that the course instructor is a very knowledgeable and passionate individual. She understands the importance of what she is teaching and she genuinely cares for the students that attend.
However, one of the things that this course has really reinforced for me is the importance of proper planning and a good curriculum. Having spent several years as an educator, I can attest to the fact that a teacher without a good lesson plan is sunk. Without a cohesive strategy for what a student is going to be learning and how you will measure their success, there isn’t much of a way for you to effectively carry out a lesson. Now don’t get me wrong, I have seen very talented teachers create whole units off the cuff, but even that takes immense planning and foresight.
The Raspberry Pi class has been reaffirming in this area because although the students seem to be enjoying the course, they don’t seem to be learning a lot of concepts that are united around a single idea. There doesn’t seem to be an end goal that the students are working towards, and therefore there isn’t an overarching goal for the course. The students learn a variety of topics, which is great, but those topics aren’t related to each other or the Raspberry Pi platform.
What I would have loved to have seen, and what I will be pushing our teacher towards after the course is over, is a curriculum that centers around strategic goals and linear progressions from the beginnings of student learning to mastery. This is what I feel is my place and passion within a program like Velocity’s student coding courses. I firmly believe that the reason that many well meaning adults fail to effectively carry out courses such as this, is because they underestimate the importance of planning. It is this underestimation of what an educator puts into creating an amazing and engaging lesson that causes so many EdTech companies and student programming courses to fail. Without an experienced educator at the helm, or at least as a consultant, you can’t hope to consistently run a truly effectively program in this capacity.
Now I will not say that I am unbiased in this area, after all I did spend numerous years attaining two degrees in Education. However, I do earnestly believe in the importance of bringing in experienced professionals into these sorts of programs and into EdTech companies in general. The expertise of someone who can consistent hold the attention of 30 students while teaching about prime numbers and poetry is not something to take lightly. I hope that more companies within the EdTech community and more organization that coordinate programming course will take this advice to heart. I want to see these sorts of endeavors succeed because I believe in their goal, but I can’t see that happening without more buy-in from the educational community.
