[Edu-sig] a non-rhetorical question

[Andy Judkis]

Vern, Richard,

Your comments were very helpful -- it's sometimes hard for me to see the 
question as a student would. They can imitate nicely, but asking them to 
analyze and synthesize (as this question does, at a very superficial level) 
seems to be asking a lot -- yet it's the essence of programming.

Reading between the lines of Vern's message, I wonder how he would want 
students to answer the question.  What I was looking for was more or less 
what he considered the wise-guy answer:

while True:
    resp = raw_input("Who is hottest teacher?")
    if resp == "Mr. Judkis":
        print "Excellent choice!"
        break
    elif resp == "Mrs. McGrath":
        print "Also a fine choice."
        break
    else:
        print "Wrong, sorry. . ."

I would have expected this question to be easy after 4 weeks of this stuff. 
They have certainly done things a lot like it quite a few times.  I had 
given out the questions ahead of time and encouraged the kids to work 
together on them, yet the day before the test, everyone seemed stumped.  I 
went over it in class in detail, and yet when they took the test, some kids 
still missed critical things -- they put the raw_input outside the loop, 
they left out the breaks, they left out the while altogether -- suggesting 
to me that they're trying to use recall and imitation, and don't really "get 
it" in a useful way.  I'm coming to the conclusion that either:
1) my expectations are unreasonable, or
2) my approach to the material is completely wrong -- at this point, after 6 
laps around the track, it isn't just a matter of tweaking something.
3) or perhaps some of both.

I should add that we start out with a week of RUR-PLE, learning about loops 
and branches and subroutines, and that seems to go quite well -- it's only 
when we move to IDLE that things start to go out of focus.

Thanks,
Andy