Hedy contains a lot of different levels that each teach a different new skill. We recommend to teach one level per lesson. This gives your students the time to fully grasp a new command or concept and practice with it, before moving on to the next level. We use this structure in our lessons: Introduction, New concepts and commands, let's get to work, puzzles and quizzes.
When giving instructions you might want to use our slides. Our slides are available on the 'For teachers' page. There is a set of slides for each level. In the slides all the new commands for that level are explained. We have aimed to explain why these changes are nessecary or how the new commands come in handy. We also give some examples of how the new commands can be used. You could of course also use your own slides, or just open Hedy and show your students around the website. Whichever you prefer to give the best Hedy lessons!
You can start your lessons by activating your students' prior knowledge: What do they already know about the subject, what did they learn in the previous lesson and which mistakes did they make that they've now learned from? This way all the previously learned commands and frequently made mistakes are fresh in your students' memories, when you start introducing the new lesson.
The new concepts and commands can be very hard for some students to fully understand. That's why it's of importance to model the proper use of the new commands to your students. Especially in the lower levels, where some students have no experience with programming at all, it can be hard for them to understand the new abstract concepts. Showing a lot of examples makes an abstract concept (for instance: 'What is a variable?') more recognizable and easier to understand ('Look, the variable pet changed into dog'). Our slides could help you with that.
Each level contains different adventures that you can find in the pink tabs. The first pink tab explains the new commands in this level. The following tabs are adventures that the students can try out and make their own. The adventures are arranged from easiest to hardest, so we recommend to start on the left and your your way to the right. The last tab 'what's next' gives a little teaser of what you'll learn in the next level. Of course, you can select the adventures you want your students to do for each level. They don't always have to make every adventure. Every adventure contains an example code, that the students can try out with the green button. The example code gets copied to the workfield, where the students can try out the code and adjust it to make it their own. Stimulate your students to turn the example code into their own projects by adding their own ideas and making their own variation of the adventure.
To test whether your students have picked up all the new info in the level, you can let them take the quiz. The quiz contains 10 multiple choice questions about the new concepts and command to that level. Not every level has a quiz yet, as we are still building the quizzes. Some levels also contain puzzles. Puzzles show the students a couple of line of code that the students have to put in the right order.
This video shows the quizzes and puzzles.
Round up your lesson by having a brief evaluation. What did the students learn? Which hardships did they come across? How did they learn from their mistakes? And of course: What did they create? Students are often very proud of their own creations, so it's nice to save a little time and give your students the opportunity to show their work to their classmates.