Teaching Python

Hi everybody!

In this blog-post I want to point out one very important thing to all of the teachers. As of teaching Python myself it became absolutely clear to me that you should always pay attention to every single person in your class. But it's extremely hard to do, because all people are different and there always will be those who just stand out. They just get the material faster, easier and, while the rest of the class is still trying to catch up, they start to become a little bit bored. They have already got everything down and are not interested in the topic at hand. It happens almost in every class and course, because everybody has different levels and speeds of comprehension. And you as a teacher can't just divide yourself into two parts and teach two classes at the same time.

CheckiO serves these exact purposes. It's not just a gaming platform, it's a place where you can solve tasks and go through the solutions of other users. So the students who are advancing in their classes after registering on CheckiO and viewing how others solve some particular tasks start to become more involved and wonder. Here are many interesting missions and unique solutions to them, and your students would want to ask many questions, whether it's how to solve something or why some task was solved by other user in some way.

During the creation of CheckiO we wanted to make it a great additional resource of teaching coding for teachers and their fast learning students, so the last could continue making progress and move forward in their studies, and you as a teacher could continue guiding them.

You can add students to a class, arrange it in some way you consider fitted, configure a course for your class, deciding which missions might be better for your group and teaching goals. There are a lot of things that you can do here from this point. You have the opportunity to put restrictions in a way so your students could only see what's happening in their class, only their posts and solutions. Or you can give them the freedom to browse further checking out how the rest of the CheckiO are solving missions, leaving comments and communicating around the solutions.

At the same time, you as a teacher and a creator of a class can oversee the whole process, subscribing on your students' activity so that you could receive on your email the notifications about all of their new shared solutions, and event comments to see which questions they are asking and whether you can help them with those. You can comment their solutions right from your email and do it privately (if needed), so only you and the student on whose solution you’re commenting could see it.

There are a great amount of teaching possibilities, but the main point is that your students will be moving forward and you won't have to think how to make them interested. You'll have the opportunity to concentrate on teaching the material to other students who aren't the fast learners in your real-life class and the CheckiO will keep others occupied. This way the advancing ones won't be chilling out and bothering others for not getting everything faster.

But if you have never played CheckiO I'd recommend you to go through this video fist

And here I want to present you two videos that we've made to explain how all of it works in more detail.

In the first one you can find out how a class looks like from inside

and the second one gives more information on the class registration process.

Do check them out and give us your feedback. We'd appreciate it very much.

P.S.

We are also currently researching which are the best tools that teachers are using in their educational work. Maybe you want to share in comments which tools you consider great and how do they help you.