Teaching Programming

We are coming to the end of our first mini-programming unit.

• Don't let students get too far ahead.  Another teacher gave me this advice.  Letting students work ahead just makes the gap between students' knowledge greater.  Despite my best attempts to keep students together, I just am struggling to do that.  Students will come in to class and say, I did all of the unit last night at home.  In part, I am excited that they are loving the work... BUT that just crates a big problem for me as a teacher.  Which, I know is selfish.  I think I need to be more explicit about why I want them to work together or not work ahead.  I also might start out the unit with some pair programming.  I anticipate some complaints from students, but... we will see how it works.  Especially since the second unit is much longer and without as many hard stops - I need to have a plan to control student work flow. 
• For students who finish early, I am having students choose from the following:
• CSS or HTML in codecademy.com - this is the most user friendly option for students
• A student showed me http://projecteuler.net/ which has a few different problems that students can think through
• Start working through CS50
• Look into the Nature of Code and do problems from there (for students who have physics experiences)
• Processing/p5
• I feel like some students who know enough programming just don't get that excited about the visual pieces of programming. For these students, I am thinking of having them do CS50.  To me, CS50 requires a lot more scaffolding for most students, but I am hoping that these students can handle it.
• I know I am going to finish this curriculum early which means I will have lots of extra time... SO... I am going to have to make some adjustments.  I am thinking about doing a web development extension for students in addition to doing the arduino programming.