Intro

This syllabus was created with the assistance of OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol. This is not an official syllabus of the franchised TheCoderSchool location in Irvine. It is an informal guide showing students and parents what working with Coach Huy as a coding coach may look like.

As part of the TheCoderSchool experience, students learn coding while working toward a project of their choosing. Because of that flexibility, Coach Huy uses this syllabus as a loose structure for keeping sessions connected and making sure important programming concepts are reviewed and practiced.

Projects differ from student to student. Some students may already have a personal project that is not documented in these teaching notes, so activities and topics may be adapted to what the student is currently building.

What a Session Looks Like

A typical session is approximately one hour and is divided into two parts.

First 15 Minutes — Review and Assessment

The beginning of the session is used to check understanding of concepts from previous sessions.

This may include:

  • A short debrief quiz
  • Multiple-choice questions
  • A small coding challenge
  • Recreating something previously learned
  • Explaining a concept in the student’s own words
  • Fixing or extending code from a previous activity

The purpose is to find out what is understood, what has been forgotten, and what should be reviewed.

Last 45 Minutes — Project Work and New Concepts

The remaining time alternates between project supervision and learning new concepts.

During project work, the student may continue an existing project, add a new mechanic or feature, debug problems, or plan what to build next.

When learning new concepts, the student may work through a guided activity, read documentation, discuss an unfamiliar programming idea, watch a short demonstration, or recreate a demonstrated feature independently.

Whenever possible, Coach Huy connects new concepts directly to an activity or to something the student wants to build.

A project is not separate from learning programming concepts. Whenever possible, the project becomes the reason to introduce and practice a new concept.

Activities

Many topics use a small activity before or alongside explanation.

  1. Identify what the student is trying to create.
  2. Search documentation for the relevant feature.
  3. Read the documentation and identify useful functions, classes, or variables.
  4. Look at examples.
  5. Form questions about confusing parts.
  6. Watch Coach Huy demonstrate the mechanic when needed.
  7. Recreate the mechanic independently.
  8. Complete a short debrief afterward.

The goal is not only to learn how to create one particular feature. Students should gradually become more comfortable figuring out unfamiliar features on their own.

Projects

Projects are an important part of sessions with Coach Huy. They provide a place to combine concepts that would otherwise be learned separately. A project may come from one of the provided activities or from something the student personally wants to create.

During project work, Coach Huy may:

  • Help break a feature into smaller problems.
  • Ask questions rather than immediately provide the solution.
  • Introduce a programming concept when the project needs it.
  • Demonstrate an unfamiliar technique.
  • Help debug code.
  • Point the student toward documentation or another useful resource.

As the student becomes more experienced, they should increasingly attempt these steps before asking Coach Huy for a complete solution.

Debriefs

Activities are often followed by a short debrief. Debriefs may ask about:

  • What a function does
  • Function arguments
  • Return values
  • Variables and object variables
  • Data types
  • What individual lines of code mean
  • How several pieces of code work together
  • How to find the same information again using documentation

Questions will usually be multiple choice. Some questions may ask the student to mark all answers that apply.

Successfully completing an activity is not by itself evidence that the underlying programming concepts were understood. The debrief checks what the student can explain after the activity is finished.

The Notebook

Students should keep a notebook or learning journal. The notebook is not meant to contain a copy of everything Coach Huy says or everything written in the teaching notes.

Instead, it should record things such as:

  • Concepts that are still confusing
  • Mistakes worth remembering
  • Questions to ask later
  • Things that need more practice
  • Short explanations written in the student’s own words
  • Connections between recently learned concepts
  • Useful discoveries made while working on a project

The teaching notes on this website can be used as the main reference material.

The notebook should help answer: What do I currently understand, and what do I still need to work on?

Using Documentation

Learning how to use documentation is part of learning how to program.

When encountering an unfamiliar feature, students will often be encouraged to:

  1. Search the documentation.
  2. Read the relevant section.
  3. Identify useful functions or classes.
  4. Read function signatures.
  5. Identify required and optional arguments.
  6. Look at examples.
  7. Try the feature.
  8. Form specific questions about anything that remains confusing.

The goal is for the student to gradually become less dependent on Coach Huy for information that can reasonably be discovered independently.

Asking Questions

Questions are encouraged. A particularly useful question explains what the student already understands and where the confusion begins.

“I found the text function and understand its first argument, but I do not understand what the x and y arguments control.”

This gives Coach Huy a much clearer place to begin than:

“How do I make text?”

Students are not expected to figure everything out alone. Learning how to identify exactly what is confusing is itself an important skill.

Using AI

AI can be useful for programming, but it should not replace the student’s own thinking.

During learning activities, students should first attempt to use:

  • Their existing knowledge
  • The teaching notes
  • Documentation
  • Their notebook
  • Their own experiments
  • Questions for Coach Huy

Copying an AI-generated solution without understanding it defeats the purpose of the activity. If AI is used to help solve a problem, the student should still be able to explain the important parts of the resulting code.

What Progress Looks Like

Progress is not measured only by how complicated a project becomes.

A student is also improving when they become better able to:

  • Remember previously learned concepts.
  • Explain code in their own words.
  • Read a function signature.
  • Use documentation.
  • Break a problem into smaller pieces.
  • Recognize when they do not understand something.
  • Ask more specific questions.
  • Debug their own mistakes.
  • Recreate previously learned mechanics without following a solution.
  • Connect several programming concepts together in a project.

Over time, Coach Huy should need to provide fewer complete solutions while the student becomes increasingly capable of finding and testing their own solutions.

What to Bring

For each session, students should have access to:

  • Their programming project
  • Their notebook or learning journal
  • The teaching notes
  • Relevant documentation

Most importantly, students should be prepared to try things themselves. Making mistakes, reading unfamiliar material, getting stuck, and asking questions are normal parts of learning to program.

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