Friday, August 16, 2013

Teaching CS? Make Custom Challenges

We love finding out when teachers are using the Khan Academy CS platform in new and creative ways. Bryan Harms decided to come up with his own supplementary programming challenges for his 8th grade math science class.

My favorite is "Draw your own face", because it's just like customizing your Mii on the Wii, but even better because you have full programmatic control. I can only assume that this is what Bryan's own face looks like:

In the challenges, Bryan gives instructions, starter code, and questions to think about, and he provides a separate link to solutions. If you're giving custom challenges in your class, you could also decide to distribute the solutions a few days after the problems, so that students aren't tempted to peek. If you have the time, review the code and let students know how great they did and how they could change this or that to make it even better.

Have you come up with your own programming challenges? Let us know!

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