I am proud of the work my students did this school year. I frequently ask the students in my class to do challenging work and they impressed me as they met my expectations time after time. I think that these students do some of the most challenging work that you can in high school, but they don’t complain, they just rise up to the challenge. Most of my students know more about programming than I did 2 years ago when I took this position. All 3 seniors passed the NOCTI exam, and I have high hopes for the class of 2025 as well.
This year, we all made our own WordPress websites, and I have been blown away by how well students were able to describe the work they have done. Taking the time to write what you learned helps put that learning into your long term memory and helps with understanding. I loved seeing how the class’s writing and understanding with regular practice writing blog posts. My favorite part of blog posts is when students feel comfortable showing their personality in their writing. It takes real skill to write a blog post about computer programming that has enough humor to make me laugh out loud, but it happened on several occasions.
The students also really impressed me with their technical capabilities. A common theme I saw in the students’ reflections was that what we learned is hard, and that they don’t totally understand some of the bigger projects we built this year. I think that they are all getting much more comfortable navigating complex environments and I hope they feel proud of their ability to do that. You don’t have to have total understanding of what you are doing to be proud of the progress you are making.
Here are some of the things we did this year:
- Python classes, unit tests
- Flask – Blog site
- SQL
- Vanilla Javascript
- React
- Introduction to Next JS
- Programming Hardware including NeoPixels and soldering
If you have any ideas of what you want to learn next year, comment below so I can learn them over the summer!