Anyone working as educator, with teen students? (work experience)

[Kyriakos]

Next to my highly prestigious etc philosophy seminar, i will be organising/presenting a 6-8 hour library seminar on 3d-modelling. The crowd there will be children, from 12-16 i suppose, given the programs in that library are aimed at such ages, and they feature computer stuff often (even robotics; the program is tied to the Bill Gates institution).

So i wanted to ask for info by people here who may work as educators with pupils of such ages...

The program is already accepted, due to my great reputation and magic flute powers. And nice look too

In essence the program will be an intro to 3d modelling, and informational also as to its ties to math, which children of that age usually view as a boring subject but they may easily change that opinion if they identify it directly to computer games

 

[NovaKart]

It's just for one day? The problem is that 6-8 hours is long. Anyone would start to lose interest and I don't know how I would manage to plan for that long of a period.

 

[bhavv]

Id need a lot of modafinil to get through just 4 hours, and the GPs wont give me any modafinil

 

[Kyriakos]

^ 6 hours spread at least to 4 days, ie 1,5 hours each time at the most

 

[NovaKart]

That's still really long. Will they be making their own designs? That should kill a lot of time.

 

[Kyriakos]

Well yes, part of the program will be the pupils modelling something basic. Maybe parts of a temple model or something.

Or an Orc pig-farm

 

[cybrxkhan]

My only significant teaching experience was teaching piano to a bunch of little kids for several years, all of them pretty much my second cousins (or cousins of my cousins who I wasn't related to). Most of them were pretty young, early elementary school age, the oldest one however was 11-13 during the time I taught her so sort of within your age range. That said, she was a well-behaved intelligent enough girl so I honestly didn't have any problems with her. Anyways, don't try too hard to be cool or interesting if it's unnatural to you; younger children probably won't realize it unless if you're that bad at it, but the older ones are definitely old enough to pick that up. It's better, in my opinion, to be a bit boring than to look like some lame old person trying to be hip. That said, trying to connect to something relevant to them isn't a bad idea, you just have to do it properly.

 

[Kyriakos]

I won't try to be hip. That is a horribly bad choice in any setting

Besides, this isn't school so those there will have at least willed to follow the program.

 

[sophie]

If you really want the students to come out of it feeling like they've genuinely learned something then the main rule you want to follow is to not lecture. Lecturing is probably the single worst teaching method in terms of retention of information. If you are going to lecture, be sure first to design some activity to engage the students so that they can easily translate the theoretical content you're teaching them into a practical application they've already grappled with.

Finding ways to engage the learners and get them to participate and take responsibility for their own learning is always going to be WAY better than simply telling them a thing. Make the lesson interactive with learner participation and activities that are going to be interesting and engaging. A big concern with that age group is going to be attention spans. I know that when I was 11-13 I had a really hard time staying focused on something for more than 25-30 minute stretches, especially in a classroom setting. Be sure to have lots of activities planned and plenty of backups in case the activity isn't as interesting as you figured in your head.

For programming in general, the common refrain is that the ABSOLUTE best way to learn how to program is have a specific problem and teach yourself the necessary programming components to solve that problem. I tried learning programming once at a theoretical level (i.e. without a problem to solve) and I made very little progress. The concepts were so abstract that it was difficult for me to focus of find any interest in them. A couple years later I was working on designing a game and needed a simulator to handle the backend of the game. It was a problem with a very specific set of parameters that needed to be satisfied. I taught myself a great deal of python and OOP in a fairly short period of time because, unlike my first attempt, I had very concrete motivations which drove the desire to learn.

Rather than talking at them and then having them design something you like (which they might not necessarily find so interesting), have them think of something simple they want to design and help them learn and internalize the necessary skills to make that happen. It's much more work, but you're going to come away from it much more satisfied with how you helped the students, and the students are going to come away feeling like they learned and accomplished something genuine and not artificial.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning