Radiococo Broadcast #23
the magic formula
Two broadcasts ago, I shared about the coding mentoring sessions I have been doing with A(ndy), and earlier this month, we concluded the mentorship with the officialising of the Andy x Fongyee Coding Club at a public workshop for kids 7-10 years old in the public library! Andy co-led the workshop with me, sharing his fishing game with kids and adults in the room and teaching them how to programme it on Scratch. Although Andy expressed that he was both excited and nervous about the workshop, we were unsure how he would respond on the day when faced with a room of mostly new people, mic-ed up and demonstrating coding concepts.
But Andy delivered. Sat next to me, he demonstrated coding concepts and confidence that made me realise what we truly accomplished during our time together. I spent the next couple of weeks after the workshop thinking about what exactly made it work. Then as I was looking through my sketchbook one day, I came across 3 hurriedly scrawled words: Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness. And then it all clicked. This was the magic formula.
Autonomy
At the start of the mentorship, I led Andy through the technical concepts, but Andy led the project's direction. He got to choose what excited him (but not too much because when we tried Roblox, it was impossible to get him to listen to anything, haha) and what he wanted to learn.
Competence
As we got more comfortable with each other and I got a better sense of who he was, I was able to design our sessions to challenge him technically. Using repetition and scaffolding, he learnt and applied the coding concepts independently, growing more and more able to reason and question aloud why things were not working so we could debug together.
Relatedness
After working on his 2-player fishing game on Scratch and even tinkering with controllers using Makey Makey, Andy finally got to share his project with his classmates and teach them how to make a simpler version of his game! They were learning from and with Andy! From projecting his voice to demonstrating the coding sequence to checking that everyone was following along, Andy absolutely flourished. He loved that his classmates could see what he had been working on and that they were playing his game.
The biggest a-ha moment when we did the workshop at the library was at the start when we did a check-in. Someone indicated that she was feeling rather meh, and Andy promptly suggested that perhaps she was feeling a little nervous about joining the workshop. His ability to empathise with others and communicate it to me was the biggest win. I know that he can learn any coding concepts he wants, but learning to listen, communicate and relate to others is something that we take a lifetime to learn, and this was his most significant milestone in that category.
I am so incredibly proud. Long live Andy x Fongyee Coding Club!
Thank you for being here this month (-:
This month’s play-list
A game to see if you got the designer’s eye :p
Histography.io–Wikipedia in dots O: