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Teaching Resources

Teaching Resources

Happy Coding now has teaching resources!

This has been one of my primary goals for the site. I think Processing is a great way to teach an introductory programming course: it makes it easy to create animated and interactive (read: fun) programs without a ton of boilerplate code, and it leads naturally to both Java and JavaScript, which then lead to more advanced topics. And I’d love to help teachers with all of the above.

That being said, I’m not a teacher. I’m not going to pretend to know what’s best for your students. I’m approaching it from the other side and trying to organize the programming topics into teachable chunks, which I’m guessing is where non-progammers have the most confusion.

You don’t have to be an expert coder to teach coding. Even just going through an Hour of Code with your students goes a long way to demystifying computer science, which is half the battle. And you don’t have to be a math teacher to teach about coding! Code can be used to tell stories (use Twine in English class), to create art (use Processing in a creative coding lesson), and to visualize data (create infographics in a social studies class). It’s not just ones and zeroes!

The teaching section is a little barebones right now, but I’m planning on adding more resources to it over time. I’m hoping to add stuff like homework assignments, power point presentations, and video lessons. I’ve got a lot of ideas that I’m pretty excited about. Even though it’s not quite complete (nothing ever is), I wanted to publish what I had so far.

If you’re a teacher and you’re curious about programming (or if you want to share your own teaching resources), please contact me or come say hello in the Happy Coding forum!