About Steve Holmes:
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Hello, I strive to combine my scientific background with ordinary everyday concepts to create fun lessons which teach the fundamentals of computing, mathematics, and problem solving. I have the following professional qualifications:
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The journey started in 2009. One night while watching my son do his homework I noticed he was doing a whole page of math problems. As he went from problem to problem I saw that he was patiently repeating the same method over and over again.
I said to him:
"You can write a computer program to do that...and you'd have fun doing it."
That idea was the spark that got me teaching kids how to program computers. Most kids are expert computer users, why not let them have some fun building software? It would be a fun way to enhance their understanding of maths. Even better, it would be a fun way of applying the maths that they've learned in school.
Teaching Highlights
2009: Start teaching text based programming to kids. Quickly decide that Scratch programming language is best for beginners.
2010: Created and taught first formal programming class to kids during Winter.
May 2011: My class won the national Scratch competition. Read about it here.
Summer 2011: Ran Scratch Summer Camps at the Gort VEC.
Autumn 2011: Attended Scratch teacher training sessions. (Funded by NCTE in collaboration with LERO and CESI).
Winter 2011: Teach beginning and advanced programming courses to kids.
National Scratch Competition Win
I've helped my winter 2010/2011 class to win the 2011 National Scratch Competition held at IT Tallaght. We found out about the competition a bit late but we had just enough time to polish up and enter our class project "SpaceWar2011". Afterwards, it took me a while to figure out how we won but I finally nailed it: my background. The rigour involved in the implementation of the game was normal for the software industry. But I had taught this to the kids. I had given them a small taste of what it is like to develop a piece of software from the idea to the finished product. Not only did they learn programming skills, but they collaborated, fixed bugs, presented and delivered a project on time!
