How to Teach Code in the Classroom
November 29, 2016
In 2010, I decided to build an app that would make teaching and learning code easy, for middle school students and up. The first version hit schools a year later – that’s when the app started to really take shape.
Since that time, StudioWeb has gone through many changes reflecting our experience, as more and more schools used StudioWeb in classrooms. This summarizes what we’ve learned:
- Gamification of the learning process is important. StudioWeb was gamified from the start, but we expanded the features over time, making StudioWeb even more engaging.
- You need to let teachers and students tell you what works, and what doesn’t work with your app and courses. Bugs were crushed, features added AND some removed.
- Visit schools, talk to students and teachers. Refined accordingly.
- Continually update incrementally to gauge each change properly.
- Develop courses that integrate with your app based on years of input from users, and from raw data derived from people using your system.
Result:
StudioWeb is now a powerful turnkey system that makes teaching and learning code amazingly easy and fun. Students are super engaged, and teachers are relaxed as they facilitate StudioWeb based classrooms.
Stefan Mischook
