On 7/6/07, Andre Roberge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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/ _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
