# Pastebin Mkz9HJ9r
# MVP Curriculum for Cohort 3

## Todos
- Find a way so that all CodeHS accounts of Cohort 3 are viewable by Jonathan.
    - This task is intentionally left unclear because I am not sure how to
      actually implement this. For example, we may actually need to
        - Create the student's accounts for them under a teacher account and
          then send the credentials to Jonathan's email
        - Create a teacher account for Jonathan and get a code to give to
          hackers to signup for and give the credentials to Jonathan over email


## Primary Objective for Cohort 3

To bring people from no coding knowledge to having the ability, motivation,
and confidence to create coding projects and continue learning new coding 
concepts with others, without the explicit urging or leading of a teacher.

## How We Might Achieve Our Primary Objective

The primary objective is _not_ for the hackers to learn a given technical
concept, but for them to gain 2 things :

(1) The confidence to come up with their own project idea and not be intimidated
by the fact that they have no idea how to implement it, but rather motivated and
excited at the prospects for how much they will need to learn in order to
achieve this project. Having the growth mindset, which would mean they know that
their abilities are malleable is extremely relevant to making this happen.

(2) The ability to be able to solve problems they at first don't even understand
but can eventually figure out. They will do this by learning to break down the
problem and solve it. In addition to the technical problem solving skills,
learners will need to learn to be comfortable with not meeting their own
expectations, celebrate failure, and be comfortable enough to ask for help.

The student's ability, motivation, and confidence to learn and solve problems
**on their own** is **MUCH** more important for them to gain any particular
technical concepts. When realizing that you are in a position where you must
trade off independence for 'getting through a concept', try thinking is there
another way that I can do this without sacrificing the student's autonomy.

Enabling students to have the ability, motivation, and confidence to do things
on their own does not necessarily mean telling them to do something and then
walking away. It is more like a coach who asks you where you want to run to and
who helps guide you so that you eventually gt there. This could mean

1. giving the student enough context to set their own objective
2. helping them make sure their objective is not too ambitious and helping them
  scope it down if it is
3. asking the student what their plan is to satisfy their objectives and to point
  out any pitfalls they may want to remove or steps they may want to add and why
4. checking in with them every so often to see how they are doing

### The Breakdown of Problem Solving

Students must be able to go  from not knowing what they don't know to being
able to figure out enough about what they don't know such that they can use
Google to give them more information.

This process involves
- being able to define your problem
- being "empathetic enough" to translating this into a problem generic enough
  for someone else may have (perhaps it means splitting your problem into
  multiple problems and only trying to solve one of them. For example if I want
  to click an image so that it plays a sound, I can translate that into (1) 
  detecting a mouse click on an element and (2) playing a sound on the web.
- to then be able to build a the query that helps me find the problem I am
  trying to solve
- to figure be able to quickly and accurately figure out from a listing of 
  titles and short descriptions of resources which resources are relevant and 
  which are not. And if none of them are relevant, to be able to refactor your
  query so that it bears fruit and once on a given resource, figure out how to 
    -  ensure it is relevant
    -  and acquire the information that you need efficiently, i.e.
        -  looking at the question
        -  skipping down the to code examples
        -  reading everything else if you're not sure if it answers the question
        -  etc.
- then if you're not sure exactly how this example works, the student will then
- try to implement this example in an isolated sandbox to make sure the example
  alone works instead of trying immediately to incorperate it into their own
  project
- knowing when and how to ask for help and being comfortable enough to ask for
it when they fall short somewhere on this process.