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.
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Getting students to think before coding is always hard. They do tend to just throw code in and see what it does.
ReplyDeleteTrial and error does have its pluses. They learn what does not work well. They learn to save programming projects regularly by versions. When the latest trial and error guess is worse than the previous version they can recover the last version and guess again. They learn patience. Trial and error takes a lot more time than sitting and thinking. They learn that planning is much less work than just hammering keys and hoping magic will occur. Some will never learn this and will keep looking for magic to occur. After 30+ years of teaching CS/programming I have learned that some will just never get it. Learning to program requires thinking skills that many students do not want to engage in.
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