Re: [Edu-sig] Elementary School Instruction
thewords = {'noun1':'house', 'noun2':'mouse'} print "In this %(noun1)s there lives a %(noun2)s." % thewords makes me weep in frustration. When I first mentioned that I was planning to teach some programming, a more experienced teacher at the school immediately said "Oh, you can't teach these kids programming, you'll have to spoon-feed
I am winding up my first year as a high school technology teacher, after 20+ years as an engineer and programmer. I teach 10th graders (ages 15 or 16) in a magnet high school for kids interested in medical careers. The school is competive to get into, and while the students are not all brilliant, the average ability is better than the population as a whole -- FWIW, average SATs are in the low 600s. For better or worse, I've gotten to put together my curriculum, and I have included a 3-4 week introduction to Python programming as part of it. We have block scheduling, so 4 weeks is about 30 hours in the classroom -- not a trivial amount of time. I have worked very hard to put something together, and many of the kids just don't get it. Last semester I started off with the Livewires materials, but almost immediately discovered that the kids were helpless whenever the materials said "now how would you do x?" So I walked them through it. If I gave them a trivial problem to solve that required them to recognize that some sort of looping would be required. . . forget it. This semester I started the unit off with a week of RUR-PLE, which I thought would help a lot. RUR-PLE is a very nice piece of work, and it's a very good way for the kids to dip their toes into the pool. It helped, but seeing where they are now -- well, they still don't get it at all. Even the difference between var = "hello" and var = hello or print foo() and print foo isn't really sinking in. I show examples, I give them exercises to do, I have them work together, but very few of them seem to build any understanding. So the idea that much younger kids are grasping syntax like this: them all the way." At the time, I dismissed that notion, but now I'm wondering if she isn't right. So, my question is, if you wanted a group of certainly-not-stupid 16 year old kids to at least get a taste of programming, understanding that many of them are there because it's a required course, and they're not predisposed to be interested in it, what would you do? What is a minimal set of things they ought to be exposed to? How much time would you spend on it? What do you think they ought to be able to do at the end of the time? Thanks, Andy
So, my question is, if you wanted a group of certainly-not-stupid 16 year old kids to at least get a taste of programming, understanding that many of them are there because it's a required course, and they're not predisposed to be interested in it, what would you do? What is a minimal set of things they ought to be exposed to? How much time would you spend on it? What do you think they ought to be able to do at the end of the time?
Thanks, Andy
Hi Andy -- It's difficult to judge an ecology remotely -- even up close we don't know how to manage wildlife successfully (is Crichton's point, or one of his character's, in 'State of Fear', my recent airplane reading). In other words, I'd have to be in your classroom for awhile in order to speak specifically of my impressions. In some schools, there's a conspiracy among the students to make teachers work hard on the most primitive basics, a kind of unionization around the premise that any "star students" make the others look bad, so if you think you're going to study hard and show off, forget about it (if you want a social life that is, and we can make sure that you do). Funny thing is: many of these students grow up to become classroom teachers and continue operating along these same principles (a union of grown-ups, fancy that). In my recent teaching experiences where Python was involved, the students tended to not know each other socially outside of my classroom. They converged to an unfamiliar, high tech, vaguely industrial location (not their familiar school) and the teacher (me) was clearly not like a classroom teacher, e.g. he (me) didn't seem to spend a lot of time in classrooms (this was an exception, not the rule). All of the above changes a huge number of parameters, including that "not predisposed to be interested" part. In other news, I was invited to speak at Europython and have been listed on the web site as a speaker, Education track. To that end, I've produced a PDF outlining my specific objectives regarding Python in a mathematics context, K-12 or college (my focus is K-12, given my background as a high school mathematics teacher in New Jersey). I've linked to this PDF from my blog: http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2005/06/dot-notation.html Kirby
participants (2)
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Andy Judkis -
Kirby Urner