For the second part of communicating with a technical audience, we had the task of teaching year 8 students how to use and play the Hour of Code game. The purpose of this tutorial was to improve on the pupils ICT skills and to show the pupils in a fun and simple way to code. The Hour of Code is a global event by computer science education week and code, it encourages people of all ages to try out coding for themselves. The game that I chose to teach the pupils was flappy bird, this game involves learning how to code although guiding the students through the creation of a game. In order to teach the year 8 pupils how to complete each step I created a flappy bird help sheet. The help sheet had to be user friendly and age appropriate as it was for Year 8 pupils, I included simple, straight to the point instructions with screen shots help them understand exactly what to do. In this task I guided the pupils through 1-10 steps. I believe the guide will help because it will be easier to understand than me simply telling them what to do and what to type. This is a starter activity for the year 8 students as they will be completing a similar task with their own ICT teacher in the Hour of Code week. I also will be involved in further tasks as part of the Hour of Code week.
When I complete my task of teaching the year 8 students I hope to develop more confidence and improve my communication skills because it will help me a lot in the future. By the end of the tutorial I hope that the year 8 students will have gained more ICT skills and the confidence to try and make a game themselves using code. I think it is important for the year 8 students to improve ion their ICT and coding skills as they are very useful to have and they will carry these coding skills throughout school to help them in other ICT activities and tasks. It allows the students to learn more about computer science in an easy and fun way and I hope by the end of the task they are able to complete each level of the game.
In preparation to teach the year 8 pupils, I had to take in consideration their skills and abilities, I did not want to overwhelm the pupil the students with difficult information, therefore I made sure each level was reasonably easy to complete. I know their ICT skills are more limited. I will help them as much as I can throughout so they won’t struggle and feel as though they are not capable of doing it. I also created the help guide in a way that was easy to follow, easy to read in order to allow the pupil to work freely and try doing it independently, with me guiding them for when they need help. Also for preparation I had to play the game myself to make sure I understand how to do it, so I can explain it correctly to the pupils without any confusion. I think the game ‘Flappy Bird’ is easy to complete and the year 8’s wont struggle.
Now that I have completed the task of teaching the year 8 pupils how to do the Hour of Code I can say I believe it went well and the year 8 students enjoyed it. For this task I worked with two different year 8 students from my previous Email task, this did not make the communication between us hard because the year 8 students were confident and it was easy to make conversation between us. This was because I communicated effectively in both tasks I completed with the year 8’s. The pupils progressed brilliantly throughout the task and one of students was a step ahead because they knew how to do it without constantly looking at the help sheet. The other student wanted more help from me and looked at the help sheet more to guide her through each level. I used the help sheet as a guide and a reminder of how to complete each level, I would have liked if the year 8 pupils used the help sheet more however they preferred to use verbal and non- verbal communication because they found it easier to work through it and understand it. The year 8 students finished the Flappy Bird coding before the hour was up, so we tried to do another coding game called Minecraft, which was very successful because we all worked together to complete the levels. Both of the students helped each other as well as me helping them along side.
While working through the task the only difficulties the pupils encountered was on the last step, which they could create their own Flappy Bird. They found it difficult to remember what block had to be connected to another block to make the bird move or to change the scene of their game. To solve these problems we all looked through the help sheet together and I helped by congratulating them each time they completed a step which encouraged them to move forward and therefore they were able to complete the task in a shorter amount of time. Using the help sheet helped the students learn to be independent and complete the task with not much help from me.
During this Hour of Code task I believe I performed well and confidently guided the pupils through the task while making myself clear and easy to understand. The pupils and I communicated well both verbally and non- verbally, I talked the pupils through certain steps more than others. I also guided the pupils by pointing out where they should click and were the blocks needed to go and they responded by doing it. I developed on my communication skills by being able to explain instructions clearly, loudly and straight forward for the pupils to understand. After completing this task my communication skills have got better because it gave me the opportunity to teach people how to complete something correctly, I now have more confidence to help the year 8 pupils.
Justification- for this Hour Of Code task I taught the year 8 pupils using a help sheet instead of just showing them ourselves, as this allows the pupil to be more confident to be able to do it themselves and they will learn more by being hands on. The help sheet is detailed which avoids me having to step in and do it for them.
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