My 2c from lots of remote math tutoring, and one coding-for-fun middle school student:
- student motivation is everything. Hard to motivate thru a screen and with cameras off. Hard to keep them engaged or recognize if they're engaged. Less of an issue with adult students.
- reduce friction for students as much as possible. Ideally one web tool, zero installs, zero setup, zero accounts. Prefer tools with few failure modes, and have fallbacks (e.g. if multiplayer breaks, at least I can screenshare single player mode)
- the middle school student liked https://scratch.mit.edu/ and some gamedev-ish tools. Also Minecraft mods. These are not remote-tutoring-friendly, but the student liked it, so I defaulted to basic screenshare methods: "try clicking the red button on the left of the screen... can you zoom in? ... here, stop sharing for a minute and let me sketch how this works... let me control your mouse for a minute so I can troubleshoot this obscure error." Kinda painful, altho I didn't have much practice with these kinds of situations.
- you'll probably get more feedback from teacher subreddits or irl conversations with teachers
My 2c from lots of remote math tutoring, and one coding-for-fun middle school student:
- student motivation is everything. Hard to motivate thru a screen and with cameras off. Hard to keep them engaged or recognize if they're engaged. Less of an issue with adult students.
- reduce friction for students as much as possible. Ideally one web tool, zero installs, zero setup, zero accounts. Prefer tools with few failure modes, and have fallbacks (e.g. if multiplayer breaks, at least I can screenshare single player mode)
- the middle school student liked https://scratch.mit.edu/ and some gamedev-ish tools. Also Minecraft mods. These are not remote-tutoring-friendly, but the student liked it, so I defaulted to basic screenshare methods: "try clicking the red button on the left of the screen... can you zoom in? ... here, stop sharing for a minute and let me sketch how this works... let me control your mouse for a minute so I can troubleshoot this obscure error." Kinda painful, altho I didn't have much practice with these kinds of situations.
- you'll probably get more feedback from teacher subreddits or irl conversations with teachers