One of the things I’ve noticed about teaching programming is that a good work day, when they’re just typing along, is a pretty quiet day. Until the students get to debugging they are pretty content.
Yesterday as everyone was working out of nowhere someone yelled, “OH SHOOT, I AM TOO BLOOD.”
Everyone looked and it was a […]
Archive for the 'experiences' Category
Last Thursday we tried the binary counting activity(pdf) from the Computer Science Unplugged site. All in all I’d say it was a great way to introduce them to the concept. I had to make my own worksheet, the one included on the page was a little simple and complicated at the same time and the […]
On Tuesday I successfully rolled out moodle to all of my classes. So far its awesome. For anyone unfamiliar with moodle it is an open source (yeah, free!) course management system. I feel like recording the experience for my own reasons as much as for anyone who might be interested. Casual readers be warned, I\’m […]
Me: “Software and programs are the instructions you give the computer. Once we start programming we will be writing our own programs and telling the computer what to do.”
Student: “Word?”
Me: “Word. Microsoft already wrote that program (Ha.), but yes we really will be writing our own programs.”
Not a single laugh.
We started out by trying to clap at rate of one Hertz. After a couple of rounds everyone got into a rhythm. Then we tried two Hertz where it quickly became clear I can’t keep a beat, at all. In my first class a few of the girls in the front asked me to stop because […]
This week I learned two things about teaching computers that I probably already knew from teaching other things.
1. Everything takes a lot longer than I expect it to. “Yeah, this will take them about a period, maybe two” turns into, “I hope we can wrap this up by the end of the week.” I thought […]
