Teaching Workshops

These workshops focus on how to teach and assess programming for NCEA standards, and occur on the Wednesday afternoon during the conference. If you struggle to find a workshop that suits you best, get in contact with us.

Workshops available

Click a link to see the full details about the workshop:

Workshop details

Helping students understand programming

Workshop description

When students take on programming for the first time, a wide range of ideas and misconceptions arise. This course will look at key ideas that are important to get right, and also different approachs to teaching introductory concepts.

Using GitHub as a platform for students' programming portfolios

Workshop description

GitHub is an essential part of any developer's toolkit. It provides a safe place to backup unlimited versions of your work, allows others to easily give feedback, promotes collaboration and can also host basic HTML/CSS/JS sites for free.

In this session we will publish an existing project (or two!) and create a basic portfolio page. We will discuss how Git is used to track projects and how you might integrate it with your class workflow.

Before the session you will need to create a GitHub account and install the GitHub app on your laptop.

Things to bring

Using Code Avengers courses for the level 1 CS external

Workshop description

In this workshop, we'll introduce you to our new Code Avengers CS courses. Understand algorithms and think computationally in a robot managed restaurant, explore programming languages and how computers are able to understand them, and gain a deeper understanding of human computer interaction! We'll also look at some material from level 2.

This workshop is run by Heidi Newton from Code Avengers.

Making the most of Code Avengers 'lesson plans' and 'teacher presentation mode'

Workshop description

The Code Avengers online learning platform teaches computer science (for 1.40-3.40), programming (1.45-2.5, 1.46-3.46), web design (1.43-2.43), and web development (for 1.41-3.41). Code Avengers courses consist of online lessons that teach concepts as well as quizzes and projects that review and reinforce learning.

Some Code Avengers’ courses also provide flexibly structured lesson plans to help teachers learn content, reduce prep time, simplify marking and engage students with a variety of fun activities to break up lessons and extra material for extension or homework.

This hands-on workshop will explore how to make use of “Code Avengers Lesson Plans”, which include the following:

  • Lesson notes
  • Interactive applets for teaching concepts
  • Presentation mode
  • Online lessons
  • Online coding projects
  • Online quizzes (kahoots style or individual)
  • Worksheets
  • Unplugged activities
  • Printable cheat sheets, posters and solution guides
  • Assessments & marking guides