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Teachers Guide for the Moving Rainbow Project

Welcome to the Teacher's Guide for the Moving Rainbow project. This guide provides resources and best practices for teaching computational thinking and computer science concepts using LED strips and microcontrollers in both formal and informal educational settings.

Educational Philosophy and Learning Theory

Computational Thinking

Learn about the four key patterns that guide computer science curriculum development: abstraction, algorithms, decomposition, and pattern recognition. This guide also covers how to integrate AI and agents into courses, and explores common design patterns including events, loops, variables, conditionals, functions, and more.

Rhizomatic Learning Theory

Explore a flexible, network-based approach to learning that abandons fixed hierarchical structures in favor of a more adaptive model. This approach allows students to move from topic to topic as their interests evolve, making it ideal for web-based hyperlinked content and agile learning practices.

Teaching Tools and Resources

Concept Cards

Discover how to use Concept Cards (also known as Sushi Cards) - teaching tools that follow the "one concept per card" rule. Learn when to use them, how to design them effectively, and best practices for creating colorful laminated cards that make complex topics accessible through simple, bite-sized examples.

Designing Concept Cards

A comprehensive guide to creating effective Concept Cards for CoderDojo classrooms. This resource covers the same core principles as the Concept Cards guide with detailed design tips, lamination strategies, and practical advice for making engaging educational materials.

Journey Maps

Learn how to create visual journey maps that keep online students focused on their learning goals. Journey maps provide a single-page view of a course, showing clear starting points, waypoints for each lesson, and destinations - helping students orient themselves and track their progress through the curriculum.

Mentoring and Community Guidelines

Mentoring Best Practices

Essential advice for volunteers mentoring kids in coding. Topics include understanding student goals and backgrounds, adapting to individual learning styles, fostering safe and encouraging environments, making learning fun and interactive, and providing constructive feedback. Also covers important things to avoid when mentoring.

Code of Conduct

Our community's Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct outlining standards for behavior, enforcement responsibilities, and guidelines for maintaining an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy learning community. Adapted from the Contributor Covenant version 2.0.

Content Development

Content Authoring Guide

A technical guide for creating and publishing CoderDojo learning content. Covers the complete publishing stack including Markdown formatting, GitHub for source control, GitHub Pages for websites, MkDocs for publishing, Material UI components, and best practices for navigation, images, and embedded videos.

Code Group Content Status

A status table tracking various coding groups and their curriculum maturity levels. Includes information about content for Scratch, Python (beginning, intermediate, and advanced), Jupyter Notebooks, Arduino, Java, HTML, robots, and more - with details about lead authors, maturity levels, completion status, and journey maps.

Getting Started

If you're new to teaching with the Moving Rainbow project, we recommend starting with:

  1. Computational Thinking to understand the core concepts
  2. Mentoring Best Practices for guidance on working with students
  3. Concept Cards to learn about our primary teaching tool
  4. Journey Maps to understand how to structure learning paths

For content creators, begin with the Content Authoring Guide to learn our publishing workflow.