woofjs tutorial for onboarding total beginners without teacher

[oldD0g]

We are considering using woofjs in the near future with 6th graders, and currently I think the tutorials might be too hard without hints. I'm worried it will be difficult to bridge from code.org to woofjs. I was considering adding more hints to the basic tutorials to see if that would help. For instance, in step 3 where it says "When you click on your shape, make it appear at a random spot." I think it would be useful to add a hint link for students to get started. This could be two-level, initially just pointing them to the right set of blocks, or giving them some specific examples. Would this be useful, or were you thinking more about screencasts ala Khan Academy or similar?

[stevekrouse]

Thanks for reaching out! That point is definitely well taken.

We normally recommend moving students from code.org to Scratch and then to WoofJS. Potentially, having your students work though a few levels of our Scratch curriculum would make this Woof curriculum more approachable.

The main point of the WoofJS curriculum is to leverage students understanding of Scratch into a new understanding of text-based coding. "When you click on your shape, make it appear at a random spot." is a very reasonable hint for a student who's proficient in Scratch, which the curriculum is designed for. It would be no problem for them to come up with the following sequence of blocks:

From here, they merely need to look in the relevant block menus in Woof (or search for the blocks in the searchbar) to replicate this layout in Woof. Of course, the student will doubtlessly make syntax errors while doing this on their first time and that's where the teacher will come in to help them figure that out. Unfortunately our error messages aren't nearly good enough for students to be self-service there.

However, if you have a limited number of teachers that can help students figure out syntax errors or if you don't have time for them to become proficient in Scratch before they tackle WoofJS, I totally understand if you'd like more thorough walkthroughs of WoofJS. A WoofJS teacher not associated with our company made some amazing ones here: https://www.codemahal.com/tutorials/woofjs/

If you wanted to create more thorough walkthroughs for WoofJS, I'd love to help however we can. Potentially, we could even embed them in our curriculum sequence if it made sense 👍

[oldD0g]

Thanks for the response. I don't think I was aware of your Scratch curriculum until you mentioned it. We will give that sequence a go and see how it works. Some of the students have already done some Scratch. In my case we are volunteering with a lunchtime club, and have the luxury of not having to teach an entire class. But I do volunteer with a full class at another school too. So I can try some different things out with 6th graders of varying abilities (and teachers too!)