guy keren wrote:
>below is a summary of the yesterday's lesson, followed by my conclusions.
>
>yesterday we were supposed to teach about ifs and about strings. amit
>pointed out that in the ifs part i rely on some strings knowledge and i
>should reverse the order, so i did that.
>
>in the class, i found that teaching about strings took longer then i
>thought. the use of 'for' loops got the kids confused - they didn't find
>it easy to grasp the idea that the for variable points to a different item
>in each loop. i only realized this when i explained how to use such a fo
>
>
>loop in order to reverse a string (by which point they had to understand
>two things - how the for loop works, how string concatenation can be
>performed from a variable into itself (revstr = letter + revstr), and how
>the reversal happens at all.
>
>we had to draw it step by step over the blackboard for things to be clear,
>and even then it wsn't clear for everyone (at least according to the
>puzzled looks on their faces).
>
>
>
For easier understanding of for loops, do you think it might work better
if you use a long, meaningful name like current_number to the variable?
This way would not expect it to be constant ("current" implies changing
value).
(if there's a chance they'll miss the English meaning, might try
translit hebrew, e.g. 'mispar_nochechi')
note that I'm not suggesting to *always* use long clumsy names - just
for the first example (and maybe in other specific cases where it might
prevent misconceptions).
