Learning to program.
More about what that means in a minute.
Will touch a bit on some issues beyond the purely technical such as various ethical questions that come up in the field.
Prepare kids for subsequent CS courses that BHS offers: AP CSP, AP CS A, and IB CS.
I worked in industry for almost three decades.
I wrote a few books.
I volunteered last year in almost all the CS classes except, ironically, this one.
This is my first year teaching high school.
These are from what I told the kids
A language.
A form of problem solving.
An exercise in picking problems to solve.
The language of the web.
It’s incredibly popular and widely used.
It’s a real language. Thus it has warts and oddities.
But it has a clean core.
If you like creating things.
If you like solving puzzles.
If you like understanding how things work.
There are a lot of details that you have to get right.
It can be very abstract.
Those two things are usually at the opposite end of the mental spectrum.
Understand, at least a bit, how all this stuff around us works.
Build tools to make your life better.
Expect to be stuck.
When you get unstuck is when you learn the most.
Program. Program. Program.
The only way to learn programming is to do it.
In some ways this is like an art class.
Get stuck. Get unstuck. Repeat.
Remind them that it’s normal to be stuck.
Encourage them to ask for help.