Brutkey

myrmepropagandist
@futurebird@sauropods.win

Wanted: Advice from CS teachers

When teaching a group of students new to coding I've noticed that my students who are normally very good about not calling out during class will shout "it's not working!" the moment their code hits an error and fails to run. They want me to fix it right away. This makes for too many interruptions since I'm easy to nerd snipe in this way.

I think I need to let them know that fixing errors that keep the code from running is literally what I'm trying to teach.

Zwifi
@Zwifi@framapiaf.org

@futurebird@sauropods.win a teacher of mine had a nice trick for this, that I reused when teaching: he would reply "I won't help you until you have drawings of what the code should do, and comments everywhere". Having the students make diagrams (if they didn't start there) helped them find architectural issues in the code logic, and writing comments had them be their own rubber ducks, and forced them to re-read things. In a lot of cases, they figured the issue out before being ready to call ^^.

myrmepropagandist
@futurebird@sauropods.win

@Zwifi@framapiaf.org

I do this with my older students and with those with more experience. This is the one course that I teach that EVERYONE must take. So there are kids there who have never programmed anything. Kids who were confused when I had them use a computer with a mouse since they'd never seen one in person before.

I'm glad we have such a course. But they just don't know enough to do this yet.

And I have an agenda: I want them to have fun.

Iris Young (he/they/she) (PhD)
@iris@neuromatch.social

@futurebird@sauropods.win @Zwifi@framapiaf.org how are you currently teaching that debugging is a skill and part of what they're learning? Do they take notes on, or see presentations of, how bugs (including typos) were identified and fixed? Maybe even presenting to each other the problems they each got stuck on, or debugging as a class on occasion so they can see the process in real time while they're not currently panicking?