The Intentional Method

We at ‘Teaching Kids Programming’ have invented and use a new method of teaching children programming. We call this the intentional method. It consists of courseware and teaching techniques. All of this material is freely available to use and improve.  The Intentional Method simply stated is teaching by guiding pairs of children from English comments (the intention) to code those comments correctly into some other programming language.  The core programming language that we use is Microsoft SmallBasic.  We have also developed Intentional teaching materials for Java, T-SQL and for Microsoft Kodu (visual programming).  There are a few key concepts that we attempt to follow in writing and in teaching all our TKP lessons (recipes).  These concepts include the following:

1) One line of English = One line of code

2) Code one line and then run your program to verify that your translation was correct

3) After correctly coding a line of English (comment), then delete that line

To understand a bit more about the need for intentional teaching you may want to watch the short talk shown below.   This 5 minute talk (presented at Ignite San Diego) attempts to show the current problem with much of the courseware out there. It also shows the power of adding intention into the teaching process.

We have done this mainly with the SmallBasic Recipes, but have extended to a few other classes. Below is a short video that we use to quickly (< 3 minutes) demonstrate the Intentional method to other teachers and technical professionals (such as programmers).  A great way to get an overview of what we are doing is to start with the videos.

More Information:
Who are our Teachers?
Our teachers are volunteers. They come from the professional developer community. We’ve also done work with classroom teachers. We’ve heard from homerschoolers as well. If you’d like to teach our courseware we recommend you complete the courseware, as a student, first. Then process to our ‘teaching tips` sections(s) of this website. In particular, you may want to take a look at our teaching training videos.
Inspirational Stories

Events

You may also find it helpful to read about ‘lessons learned’ from our Past Events.  If you host or lead your own TKP event, we’d LOVE to hear how it goes.  Feel free to drop us a note, send pictures and/or video to us via commenting on this blog page.