Why Your Coding Curriculum Should Start with Drawing
Walk into most introductory CS classes and you'll find students staring at a blinking cursor, trying to write a function that calculates the factorial of a number. They're learning about parameters, return values, and recursion — but they're doing it in a vacuum. There's no color, no shape, no visible result they can point to and say, "I made that."
Now picture a different classroom. Students are writing functions that draw trees — with parameters for trunk height, leaf color, and branch count. They call that function in a loop to generate an entire forest, each tree slightly different. They're learning the exact same concepts — functions, parameters, loops, variables — but they can see the results on screen. They can share their forest with a friend. They can make it their own.
Which classroom would you rather teach in?
The problem with traditional CS curricula
Traditional CS curricula tend to start with abstract concepts: data types, conditionals, loops, and functions, all taught through text-based exercises. Calculate a sum. Sort a list. Convert temperatures. These exercises are technically correct, but they ignore a fundamental truth about how beginners learn: feedback matters.
When a student writes a factorial function and gets the number 120, they have no intuitive sense of whether that's right or wrong. When a student draws a circle and it appears on screen — too big, too small, in the wrong place — they get immediate, visual feedback that drives them to adjust, experiment, and iterate.
This is not a minor pedagogical detail. It is the difference between students who persist through difficulty and students who decide coding "isn't for them."
Drawing teaches the same concepts
Every core programming concept you need to teach in an introductory course can be taught through drawing and creative coding.
- Variables: Store colors, positions, sizes. Change them and watch the drawing change.
- Loops: Draw a row of circles. Draw a grid of squares. Repeat a pattern.
- Conditionals: If the circle is on the left side, make it blue. If it's on the right, make it red.
- Functions: Write a function that draws a house. Call it five times with different positions to make a neighborhood.
- Arrays: Store a list of colors and cycle through them as you draw.
None of these examples are dumbed down. They're real programming, applied to a domain that students can see and understand.
Compare two students
Student A starts with a traditional curriculum. In week one, they learn about variables and data types by writing code that converts Fahrenheit to Celsius. In week three, they write a function that calculates whether a number is prime. By week five, they can sort an array — but they've never built anything they'd want to show someone.
Student B starts with a drawing-first curriculum. In week one, they use variables to position shapes on a canvas and draw a simple face. In week three, they write a function that draws a tree and use it to create a forest scene. By week five, they're animating a character across the screen — and they've already shown their parents three different projects.
Both students have learned variables, functions, loops, and conditionals. But Student B has built a portfolio of visible work, developed a stronger intuition for how code behaves, and — critically — is more likely to keep going.
Addressing the "but they need algorithms first" objection
Some educators worry that starting with drawing is "not rigorous enough." This concern misunderstands what rigor means in an introductory course. Rigor is not about which problems you solve — it's about whether students truly understand the concepts.
A student who can write a nested loop to draw a checkerboard pattern understands loops just as deeply as a student who uses a nested loop to multiply matrices. The difference is that the first student can see when their loop is wrong and knows how to fix it.
Drawing-first does not mean drawing-only. Once students have a solid foundation and genuine confidence, they can absolutely move into algorithms, data structures, and more abstract problem-solving. But starting with drawing gives them the foundation and motivation to get there.
Research supports creative coding
The creative coding movement has gained significant traction in CS education research. Studies on tools like Processing, Scratch, and p5.js consistently show that students who begin with creative, visual projects develop stronger mental models of programming concepts and report higher engagement and self-efficacy.
The key insight from this research is simple: when students can see what their code does, they learn faster and enjoy it more.
How codeguppy.com supports a drawing-first approach
codeguppy.com is a free JavaScript coding platform designed for exactly this kind of instruction. Built on p5.js, it gives students an 800x600 canvas that's ready to draw on from the very first line of code — no setup, no boilerplate, no configuration.
Students can start with a single line:
circle(400, 300, 100);
That's a circle, on screen, in seconds. From there, they can add color with fill(), draw rectangles with rect(), set backgrounds with background(), and build up to animations using the loop() function. Every step of the way, the result is visible.
The platform also comes with built-in sprites, backgrounds, and tile sets, so students can move from drawing to game development without leaving the environment.
A curriculum built on this philosophy
If you want a structured, ready-to-teach curriculum that follows the drawing-first approach, the codeguppy.com curriculum covers 23 lessons with over 700 slides and 300+ mini-projects. Available in PowerPoint format for $200 (classroom use) or PDF for $17.50 (home use), it's designed for grades 8-12 and gives teachers full flexibility to customize lessons to their classroom needs.
Start with what students can see
The most effective coding curricula don't start with the most abstract concepts — they start with the most visible ones. Drawing gives students immediate feedback, creative ownership, and a reason to keep coding. The algorithms will come. But first, let your students draw.
Visit codeguppy.com to try a drawing-first approach in your classroom today.
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