Initially I plan on getting to know how much the student knows, if it’s nothing I’ll be starting with basic coding like making a calculator, before moving into more complicated things.

If the student has work that they need help with, I can follow that. But if the student wants me to come up with the work, I can make up some work to go through.

The last lesson I did with the primary school students as a Code Club Volunteer went as follows: I sat the class in front of a large paper board.
We then talked about what game we wanted to make in scratch, and I walked them through game design.
This includes having to note everything no matter how insignificant it may seem.

The children wanted to do cookie clicker, some decided to do something different, but I supported them when they came across problems, so all was good. But after drawing a basic UI (user interface, in this case the game screen), I got them to point out everything in the game that they would want, press a button, to increase a counter, that is then displayed above, and then a little bit on upgrades.

While this was a lot of effort on my part to create a very open ended lesson, it was completely worth it and all of the primary school students loved it.


When working in the secondary school, I was far more restricted, so I taught the content that the teacher set prior to me arriving.

This meant that I would sit down and occasionally check work, say what’s good about it, and anything that could do with another look at.
If people required help, I would walk over and talk through the question using a made up example.

Overall, I felt it was important that anything that I did teach, I didn’t give the answer, but directed students into finding the solution, and this meant that the student became more proficient and less reliant on me.

I’m still very proud of the students I taught there because no matter how disruptive, they always learnt something.


In short, if possible I like to make the work as open to interpretation as possible, meaning more chances for mistakes (meaning more chance to learn from them), and to help guide students into becoming proficient and ideally not requiring me by the end of teaching.