[Edu-sig] a non-rhetorical question

[Kevin Driscoll]

On 7/6/07, Andre Roberge <andre.roberge at gmail.com> wrote:
> But, this is straying far from the original question.  These are kids
> that have had a few weeks of instruction (with probably less than 6
> hour of class time per week).  What can be reasonably expected of
> them?


High school CS teacher (at least until very recently) here!

Of course, it's impossible to speculate the progress a student should
make in 6 hours of class time but it is interesting to consider the
vast number of approaches to teaching those first 6 hours of
programming that are developing.

Three years ago, I was definitely on the lexical path and would have
expected students to be able to answer Andy's question after a couple
class meetings.  However, in my most recent course, I used PyGame and
exposed students to object-oriented data structures first and logic /
algorithms second.

This was a sweeping change from early courses in which we talked a
little about "variables", then looked at operators and control
structures, before returning to more complex data structures.

Especially for the student with weaknesses (or simply a lack of
confidence) in mathematics, building meaningful data structures was be
a great way to make them feel successful in those first few class
meetings.

And, finally, to reinforce this point: it is my experience that if
students taste success early in a new subject, they are far more
willing to take on challenging work down the line.

Great thread so far!  Thanks, everyone!

Kevin


-- 
http://kevindriscoll.info/