How We TeachOur goal is to educate New Mexico's primary school children in programming, electronics, and robotics. OSK uses a graded instructional approach. For our younger learners, we begin by using simple apps and robots that help young children visualize the procedures and logic that are so important to critical thinking and programming such as Cubetto robots and Scratch Jr.
As children progress, we add more complexity to the concepts we teach: story telling and basic game creation. We also begin to transition to Python, a real-world programming language. Using a block approach that is similar to one used at earlier levels allows the children to transition in a logical and coherent way to text-based programming. This block approach remains extremely useful for our older kids, since typing skills are often not mastered until high school. We continued our emphasis on Python as we begin to use hardware such as BBC micro:bit and Raspberry Pi. From here, we begin to truly open up the world of programming and electronics. Student begin to interact with games like Minecraft using their programming skills, and they begin to code their own games. Electronic components add extra challenge as the students learn about electronics and how to use them to measure and control the world around them. |