One Step at a Time
Khud believes in the power of measuring progress and continuously evolving. At Khud, we thrive on taking incremental steps that could inform a revolution in society. Classroom observations and experimentation supports this perspective and the passion and energy that a fresh perspective adds define our success in the field. Summer interns are recruited from various fields of study who participate in our programs and help us excel and maintain momentum in the classrooms. This year's interns focused on Basic & Advanced Python courses in Johar Town & Mughalpura campuses in Lahore.
Python course is one of the core modules of Khud curriculum undertaking the values of disruption, innovation, and problem-solving. Our students fully immerse in code-writing activities and are given hands-on practical experience to master the skill. The interns were mainly responsible for identifying learning gaps in the curriculum and building a sustainable strategy to bridge these gaps. The differences recognized by the cohort included a vague understanding of fundamental concepts among the students, lack of practice, and a general language barrier while learning from English-language based tutorials of programming languages.
A vague understanding of fundamental concepts stems from the pace at which the course was being taught in the schools and the easy access to already written customizable codes on the web browser. To overcome these issues, the curriculum was tweaked to suit the needs of the classroom. By dividing the chapters into small subtopics with short exercises after each subtopic, and a project or two after every main topic, the interns were able to address the primary issues. Several colors and interactive themes were selected in slides to make coding seem less intimidating and to encourage students to fully own their projects instead of copying codes from the web.
Overcoming language barrier is a challenge in these schools, and a proposed long-term solution was to increase efforts to improve English language course at school so the student could not only understand the content but comfortably look up the errors they face in their code. In the short term, this problem is being addressed but adding several local languages videos, less text-based content and interactive animations to cement each concept, with some videos focusing on the coding aspect and others on the general.
We believe these insights from the summer cohort would prove to be instrumental in the long-run and would help the students realize their potential and overcome barriers around them.
