Thursday, March 15, 2018

Quick Thought For The Ides Of March

So we start spring break next week, and today and tomorrow (we are on a block schedule) I'm having my CS Essentials classes look at the function/procedure event that handles the placing the wavefront numbers into the 2D array. They are looking at it ON PAPER. I am asking them to comment lines and mark it up in whatever way their brains are seeing this, so I can try and get a bead on how they might be thinking about code. This is something I think I need to work into my classes more - reading code and trying to make sense of it away from the computer. I think too many of my students just go through trial and error instead of going into deep thought about the algorithms in the code itself.

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Teaching CS IS Hard

Well we have hit the wavefront algorithm assignment in my curriculum, which ultimately will be used to navigate our little VEX self driving vehicles. And for probably 90% of my students in CS Essentials, welcome to what my PLTW CS colleagues on the PLTW forums have termed "code shock" with students.

I think one of the hardest things to manage in designing a curriculum is how to dial the difficulty up at a proper pace for the "center mass" of the class skill level. And in this new curriculum from PLTW this particular unit starts out manageable, but suddenly shoots up rapidly, thus the "code shock" mentioned above. I also have the challenge of having a lot of kids in class who simply don't want to interact in class when, for instance, I'm working through pseudocode on the board.

The good thing for me is it has really illustrated how much more I need to emphasize getting the students off the computers, and crunching out the problem in flow charts or pseudocode. Many of them just want to do everything while in the code editor, and I keep telling them (and trying to show them as well) to solve the problem first, THEN translate your solution into code, and then get into the debugging process.

For my audience of few to several out there, I welcome any insight or input you might have!