Student Learning

Hi David,

I share your approach; I want the students to understand the concepts. That doesn't mean knowing the "big words", as Karen puts it, but being able to apply the concepts in new situations. Some minimal terminology is still necessary, I think, in order to enable students to help others and explain what they have been doing. Terms such as "conditional statement" are for the teacher, the students could be taught to simply call it "if-block".

Now, how to make sure that they have understood the concepts? I'm currently preparing a course where I will try the following: I'm preparing a game where all sprites except the hero are already fully programmed. The students must program the hero themselves. Every level is clearly associated with one concept, and in order to get through the level, students must program the hero according to this concept. Example: a taxi arrives, and the hero must board it. Solution: go to taxi in a forever loop. The taxi in turn checks whether the hero indeed comes along when the taxi pulls out. The necessary new  concept at this point (forever loop) is learned through a specific handbook chapter which explains it and contains exercises.  The idea is that the "master exercise" (get through the level) acts as a focus: during the regular exercises, students can play and try this and that, but to get through the level, they really need to understand and apply one particular concept, otherwise it's "Game Over".  In order to avoid that students blindly copy their solutions from the regular exercises, there is always a little twist that they discover only when the game goes on. In the taxi case, the taxi stops at some point, the hero must get out and reach a specific entrance area on the stage.  For this, they need to rewrite their forever loop into a repeat-until-key-pressed loop (same handbook chapter), sequenced with a goto x y (previous handbook chapter). 

I have no experience with this setup yet; all I can say already is that the programming effort on my side is rather high (but it's fun...). If it works out well, I will certainly share the resources.