Episode 6: Gaining a Deeper Understanding of Python With Coding Challenges

Kelly and Sean are back this in this week's episode to talk about the role of coding challenges for student understanding. Coding challenges are teacher-defined coding problems that students tackle individually or in groups with more than one possible solution. The advantages of these challenges compared to passive learning include deeper retention of skills and knowledge, opportunities for social and emotional education, and increased student confidence through subject mastery.

What are coding challenges?

Coding challenges are teacher-defined coding problems that students tackle individually or in groups with more than one possible solution. Challenges are time-bound, i.e. they must be solved within a set period of time and range in complexity from simple code snippets to complete programs.

For example:

• A 5-minute challenge to add comments to existing code


• A 3-day challenge to create a game in Python


• A standing challenge to solve a complex math problem by the end of the course

Support Teaching Python

Links:

• Simple Programming Problems — This page is a collection of progressively more difficult exercises that are suitable for people who just started learning. It will be extended as I come up with new exercises. Except for the GUI questions, exercises are generally algorithmic and should be solvable without learning any libraries. The difficulty of the exercises of course somewhat depends on the programming language you use. The List exercises for example are more complicated in languages like C that don’t have build-in support for lists.
• Coding Games and Programming Challenges to Code Better — Coding games to improve your programming skills.
• The 10 Best Coding Challenge Websites for 2018 – Coderbyte – Medium
• 4 Things Transformational Teachers Do | Edutopia
• seantibor/microbit-compass: A digital compass using the BBC micro:bit and a laser-cut compass rose — Repository for the 6th grade Microbit Compass Challenge
• Chapter 3: Guess the Number — The guess the number challenge inspiration.