So why am I creating a special course for people who want to teach, to learn to program? Well, that's because honestly, as a teacher, what your daily experience with programming is going to be, is different. You have different needs as a teacher, with regards to your learning and doing of programming, than another people. So both Computer Science courses, are developed with the intention of serving those people who are probably going to use programming in their career. Maybe they are software engineer, or maybe they're going to be a biologist, but their job is to write code that solves a probably defined problem by somebody else. Maybe it's a biology problem, maybe it's a software engineering problem, but a problem is defined by the group that they are working in, that they need to use a computer to help solve that problem. So they're expecting to spend good amount of time writing code, and moreover writing code to solve very specific problems, either about their app, or again maybe about DNA testing. Something like that. In fact your needs as a teacher are actually even different than the needs that we have for your students in writing code. So what do we want K12 kids doing around programming? Well, it'll be a number of things, but certainly writing code is a really really important part of it. But compared to software engineers or professionals, what we want to really focus our K12 kids on, is on building their own creations by using code. Because this is one of the things that's super cool, and most of us think is really awesome about programming, is it allows you to make things of your own design. Whether that's an app to improve your community, or just a video to entertain your sibling. That's going to be one of our focuses. But still with your students, there's going to be pretty focused on writing code, they're writing code to make things they want. As a teacher, you're not going to have a lot of time spending there writing code. Because your students are going to be writing code, and you're going to be running around trying to help them. So you need to know the process that they're going through. We need to get you through that process as efficiently as possible. So what we're going to be providing in our code writing portions of this class, for you as a teacher, is a walk-through. Rather than saying you have to solve this puzzle yourself, we've solved the puzzle and we're going to walk you through it, and we're going to highlight certain sections, and point out particular things along the way. Because this is essentially the problem-solving puzzle that your students are going to be calling you over and asking for some help with. So what's that going to look like? We're actually going to have a set of Google slides, where we're going to go step-by-step and we're going to give you the exact directions, for exactly what you need to do. We're going to direct you to the particular part of the pallet. Remember that pallet icon? That's where you can choose the different types of instructions that you have. Then we're going to tell you exactly which instruction to pick, and how to modify it. Now, this is different than the interactive puzzles, in that we're actually asking you to go through the motions like your students will need to, of going and selecting and modifying those. Because you need the practice so that you can help them do it effectively. All right? So again we're just trying to guide you through it faster, so that you can be more focused around the problems students will have. So in fact, that is by the way, probably to say, what do teachers spend most of their time doing with regards to programming? It is debugging. Because your students are going to get stuck. Their program isn't going to do what exactly they want it do, and they'll try to describe to you what they want it to do, and then you'll have to try to help them read their code, and understand, and help them through the debugging process. But you will essentially have to be debugging yourself. So as you're doing this code writing for this class, where it's very scaffolded, and we're walking you through the overview, then what we're going to ask you to do, is as you're going along, to think about and write some comments about what might students find hard on the step or more what they get wrong, especially if they weren't actually given the instructions of exactly what to do. So that's we think really important valuable thing for you to spend some time doing in this class, so that you'll be better prepared for your own.
