teaching-journal

How to teach programming

by Felienne Hermans

Assumptions

• teaching programming to children

Summary

• Be a runner or a knitter
  • don’t criticize choice of tool or language
  • be encouraging, regardless of skill level
• Mistakes can be great learning opportunities BUT
  • textbooks often focus on mistakes

    “You will fail and it will be frustrating”

• Cognitive load
  • be sure to leave room for remembering and reflection
• Study: Minimal guidance does not work
• “You don’t become an expert by doing expert things”0
  • If you’re training for a marathon, you don’t run a marathon every day
  • If you want children to become problem solvers, they first need to build the foundational problem solving “chunks” of skill that they can rely.
• Opinion: current educational frameworks focus on open exploration and inquiry but what would direct instruction for programming look like?
• Vocalizing (reading out loud) source code was pretty successful with children
  • found that there’s no consistent model for how someone says “assign x equals 5”
  • findings: writing and reading code is not as effective as, EITHER
    • writing and reading code with an explanation (theory), OR
    • reading code with an explanation
      • note: writing code is often an outcome of most curriculums
• Assessments
  • only 23% of code clubs used any form of assessment
  • Goal: give the teacher an idea of what students understood from a lesson
    • exit tickets
      • simple and short multiple choice form
• Making programming like school isn’t necessarily a bad thing
  • learning doesn’t have to be fun to be motivating
  • building a skill can be motivating all on its own

Notes

• Slides were hand-drawn with GoodNotes for the iPad