Welcome Andreas!
On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 8:51 PM, Andreas Mueller <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi.
I'm new to SWC and I'm about to finish the instructor training.
I have a very basic question about presenting the material.
I'll host a git workshop soon at my university (not branded as SWC but
using the material).
Looking at the git workshop at the last scipy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKFNPxxkbO0
Azalee is going through slides and then doing live coding.
The live coding is exactly the same as in the SWC material, but it's not
on the slides.
So I'm not sure where he gets the material from. Is it learned by heart or
does he have a printed out version next to him or somewhere else?
It's really entirely up to you, but here's some anecdata for you, which may
or may not be useful...
Back when I was teaching introductory programming, I used to write out every
examples I wanted to go through with my students before each lecture,
usually the day before. I would put all these programs in a text file and
print them out. When I went to the lecture I'd place the print out face-down
on the lectern (so I couldn't see it) and go through each example etc. in
turn. For some reason writing the programs out first meant I remembered them
pretty well, but having this "safety net", in case I got completely lost,
made me feel a lot better. I think I only referred to a print out about once
in a decade. The safety net wasn't really there in case I couldn't make a
program work, it was there in case I forgot which example came next or lost
my train of thought.
When I went through the example programs (and this is a little different to
SWC) I would approach them in a "Socratic" style, i.e. by getting the
students to design each program by answering my questions. So, I would say
things like "We want the turtle to draw a square, what should it do first?"
"How far should it travel?" "What next?" "Can we write that in a few less
lines of code?" (hint for introducing iteration), etc. This way, the code
from each lecture would be different to the code I had written the night
before, and sometimes radically so, which meant I had to put the student-led
code up on the VLE after class. When we wrote "Python for Rookies", the
intention was that each chapter of the book would be an expanded version of
these lectures, with extra material and examples. Some chapters (like the
one on recursion) came out almost exactly as we had taught them, although
that book is pretty outdated now.
The first time I did this sort of thing I was taking a Java class who had
already had most of a year of being taught with OHP slides (those were the
days). On my first program, which was probably trivially simple, I forgot
some semi-colon or bracket or something, and got a compiler error. Some poor
kid said "OH, so YOU get those error messages too" -- he'd spent most of a
year genuinely believing that "real" programmers don't make mistakes. This
convinced me never to present pre-prepared solutions to an introductory
class again. I realised that the most useful thing I could teach my students
was how I think about code and writing programs. That might still not be
very good (maybe I am a terrible programmer, how would I ever know?!) but
unless one of you natural science people can invent a telepathy machine, I
think it is the best I can manage.
Hope you are enjoying the training!
Sarah
--
Dr. Sarah Mount, Research Associate, King's College London:
http://soft-dev.org/
Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute: http://software.ac.uk/
twitter: @snim2
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