About the Teacher's Guide

Overview

The PencilCoder curriculum was created in the belief that students learning coding are best served by a teacher who is expert in the language being studied. However, even teachers with substantial coding experience may not have the requisite experience in the full range of web-programming tools that underlie Pencil Code—CoffeeScript, CSS, jQuery, and HTML. The resources provided on this page aim to help teachers become that expert, both in the Pencil Code environment, and in web-programming in general. Collectively, we will refer to these materials as the Teacher's Guide.

In an effort to meet the needs of a broad and diverse audience, the Teacher's Guide addresses a wide range of topics. In some ways, these resources can be seen as an extension to lessons. However, the guide does more than simply explore concepts and functionality at a more advanced level and provide related hacks. These resources provide context and background for each lesson, both describing how they fit into the overall curriculum and highlighting various pedagogical considerations.

Structure

For each lesson, the Teacher's Guide contains a set of notes with some or all of the following sections:

• Overview: A description of the overarching objectives of the lesson.
• More about the lesson: Additional notes directly related to the lesson. For example, this section might discuss nuances of newly-introduced functions or suggest closely related topics to explore.
• Beyond the lesson: Additional topics not directly related to the lesson. Frequently, this section will discuss more advanced hacks likely to be inappropriate for most students at their present stage of development. Extensions include additional related functions, variants of a function, variations on the syntax introduced in the lessons, notes pointing to relevant previous lessons and/or future lessons, as well as coffeescript, javascript, html, and jQuery topics that may naturally arise out of the current topics.
• What can go wrong: Tips on anticipating and addressing lesson-specific pitfalls.
• Pedagogy: A discussion of pedagogical considerations taken into account when constructing the lesson and/or presentation suggestions for the classroom teacher.
• Technicalities: Technical details related to the lesson. Think of this as material that might show up in a footnote.

Units

Access the Guide here.