[Edu-sig] Encouraging students to plan effectively

[Steve Howell]

"Jason L. Asbahr" wrote:
> 
> [...]
> Also, Timothy, going so far as to actually enforce a planning process
> would probably backfire.  There are intrinsic rewards to various degrees
> of planning (better code, less frustrating debugging, potential for rapid
> adaptability to changing customer requirements), but they are not always
> obvious, especially to beginners.
> 
> Explicitly *rewarding* ("bonus points") individuals and teams that plan
> (and plan well) might help ingrain the practice.  Up front reward for
> investing the energy in planning coupled with deferred reward as their
> projects run with more features and less debugging, yes, I think that
> might do it.  :-)
> 

Good points.

If you have a planning process based on index cards, you can create a
tangible reward system for the planning process.  After each task is
finished, you get to move it from the to-do pile to the done pile.  This
gets very addictive, even for adults!  

I've visited a couple real-world programming shops that do Extreme
Programming, and they have bulletin boards where they put the cards up,
and as the cards get completed, they move the cards to the "done" area
of the bulletin board.