SI Seminar by Agnese Zamboni
Talk: Program Your Own Castle - Developing a Self-Guided Tutorial for the Hour of Code
USI, Lugano, Switzerland
Thu, Oct 5, 2023
Agnese Zamboni and Matthias Hauswirth presenting “Program Your Own Castle’ - Developing a Self-Guided Tutorial for the Hour of Code” at the USI Software Institute.
Abstract
The Hour of Code© is an initiative to introduce millions of students to one hour of computer programming. Each year during the week of Grace Hopper’s birthday (December 9, 1906 – she invented the first compiler and coined the term ‘bug’), teachers world-wide direct over ten million students to work through one of the programming tutorials listed on the Hour of Code web site. In this talk we present this summer’s effort at the USI Software Institute, funded by an USI Didactics Innovation Grant, to develop a self-guided one-hour introductory Python tutorial. Our tutorial was developed by a team of USI Bachelor students on top of Luca Chiodini’s PyTamaro Web platform. We describe the development, from the ideation in the mediaval Fortezza Bellinzona and the building of toy castles, over the collaborative development of visual castle components with PyTamaro, the choice of programming concepts to convey, to the development and sequencing of the activities and the testing with users.