dave.yoon@gmail.com
I came to dinamicoop with the vision of teaching a basic web development class to the students in the local community. The staff at Dinamicoop was very friendly and helpful, Lins Walter, and Leandro. They gave me the freedom to design a course as I saw fit, and answered all of my questions.
I had 5 regular students, Raul, Alexandro, Leandro, Tony, and Paulo, ages 15-26 and several students that dropped by for a course or two. The students ended up having a very wide range of experience with technology (and English!) My first class was a basic introduction to HTML, Css and Javascript, it turned out that most of the students at dinamicoop are quite web-literate, and some of the students had already built several pages using web design programs. Over the next few weeks, I taught them how to code html by hand, as well as the inheritance rules for CSS and some basic javascript. The students were all quite bright (Raul especially), and seemed to grasp the concepts despite my broken Portuguese. Google translator was a great asset. It was also very useful to have the students come up to the board and do an exercise after the lesson in order to measure how much they had retained.
I’d suggest splitting the class into two groups, a basic group to teach really basic web development skills to those who want to learn more about it, and a more advanced group (raul, Paulo, maybe a few others) to help them develp the knowledge that they currently have into something a little more professional.
Another good idea might be to have a record of attendance, or a way of promoting attendance. Sometimes (especially during bad weather), the classroom would turn into a private lesson. Portuguese would definitely help, Paulo speaks English quite well, but the other students don’t speak too much. On the other hand, that definitely encouraged me to learn the language quickly!
