Noob to master programmer in 10 days

As an experiment Mads Høbye from Fablab RUC took on the challenge to teach 18 students how to program in 10 days. Breaking the ice of programming has proven to be hard. The classic pedagogical way of learning på playing has proven to highly inspirational for the students, but much of the time is used on other things than learning to actual program. So instead of having a workshop with multiple educational purposes (make your own design, learn to solder, learn to program and learn to make physical prototypes) Mads decided to focus on one thing - only programming.

It became 10 extremely intense days where the students were forced to program their own games over and over again until they understood the fundamental components of programming (loops, classes, methods, variables, statemachines etc.). Within the first two days they had to program pong in 5 different ways. Just to get a feel of it.

The last two days they got free hands to program their own game. Instead of having 10 days to make their own program they had to do the same thing in 2 days. They all managed to make their own program. The games were programmed in Processing and converted to Processing JS. They games can be played online here.