Wanted: Advice from CS teachers

[mintspies@beige.party]

@AbramKedge @futurebird I do this (in the context of a different academic subject) with "bad" essays, where we work collaboratively to find errors and redraft improvements. Hope it's effective for you.

[rpsu@mas.to]

@futurebird I think CS students and also everyone else should use the list, but in reverse order.
1). Calm down, you’ll get over it and find a fix in no time. Everyone does.
2) Read the error and read it again. It tells you pretty much where, or sometimes even what exactly is the problem. Fix is right there.
3) The error makes sense, it is not magic. Ever.
4) It is probably a typo, you’ll find it after competing the first 3 points. Go to 1).

[fubaroque@mastodon.social]

@futurebird Kids don’t know how to fail anymore. How did that happen? 🤔

[pthane@toot.wales]

@futurebird
I used to get the same teaching basic electronics. Plenty of schools for getting it wrong. Polarised components wrong way round, resistor and capacitor values wrong, wires in wrong holes, bad soldering, very, very bad soldering. The worst was a student who managed one huge blob of solder on a board bridging all eight pins on a DIL IC (probably a 555).

[mansr@society.oftrolls.com]

@futurebird > The error will make sense.

Have you heard of this thing called C++?

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@mansr

Yeah...

what I'm trying to convey is that there is a *reason* why the code isn't working and it will make sense in the context of the rules the got dang computer is trying to follow.

It might be annoying or silly, but it will "make sense"

[mschfr@mastodon.social]

@wakame @futurebird Those errors also have their own language and you have to learn it. You have to be able to interprete stuff like "Error 231 in Line 981: None type is not iterable". Most error messages are not "normal" language you can understand with your normal language skills.

(feeding the error messages into an LLM and asking to explain them really helped me, btw.)

[itgrrl@infosec.exchange]

@futurebird assigning code broken in specific ways & having a rubric for teaching the troubleshooting sounds like it should be SOP for coding courses, is this not normally part of the curriculum? 🤔

(def not dumping on you, asking as an Old who is a self-taught potato coder who never did a CS degree & feels like the way I learned basically anything that I do know was: type it in from a magazine or other source / modify working code that’s similar to what I need -> make mistakes in transcription / tweaks -> code doesn’t run or runs with errors -> troubleshoot the mistakes -> learn stuff 🙃)

[funnymonkey@freeradical.zone]

@wakame @futurebird

I love this thread and I love this meme.

I'd share this meme with them, and also share that error messages are like Captain Obvious: they might be accurate about showing when a problem exists, but often less helpful when fixing it.

I'd also highlight that bugs are a normal part of programming (and that code can "work"but still be shite).

From a classroom place, would "silent coding" followed by QA work as a structure?

Or is that what's in place when they call out?

[ligasser@social.epfl.ch]

@futurebird I usually have clear me/them speaking parts in the course. While I speak, they listen, which I enforce up to the last whisper.

Also, the "me" parts only take 15-20 minutes each, then it's time for questions, https://github.com/ineiti/livequiz, or other interactions.

For the exercise sections, the "me" parts are of course much shorter.

[aliengasmask@mas.to]

@futurebird in my experience the jump from teaching scratch, where there are no syntax errors, to python is huge.

None of the courses ive taught (not my own) included anything covering how to deal with parser errors and i think its an entire lesson in itself. Not sure any students i had would have the patience to follow that lesson as it would be hard to have the "i made the computer do something" pay off.

Maybe a parser error cheatsheet is the answer?

[mansr@society.oftrolls.com]

@futurebird I know what you mean, and you're perfectly right when it comes to sane programming languages. However, C++ compilers have a habit of spewing out error messages the size of a Tolstoy novel in response to mistakes as trivial as a missing comma. Now I assume you're not teaching the kids C++ as that would be quite irresponsible.

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@ligasser

"I usually have clear me/them speaking parts in the course. While I speak, they listen, which I enforce up to the last whisper.

Also, the "me" parts only take 15-20 minutes each"

This is how I normally teach (although with middle school students I keep "me" bits to under 8 min each) this is why it's so annoying when they call out during these sections. Something they wouldn't ever do normally.

Something about coding and seeing the error makes them not see it as "time to listen"

[mensrea@freeradical.zone]

@futurebird @wakame I'm not a teacher but I have given interns and others learning projects. Like "here is some code that should do <the thing> but it doesn't work. find why it's not doing <the thing>". I also used to come into the room and ask "what's broken?" making the framing, there's always something not working and we're here to find out way. and always starting my help with "what have you tried"

[bumblefish@mastodon.scot]

@futurebird This is an excellent exercise and most of your students will get a lot out of it. Be prepared though for the 3-6 who simply will not believe you. Especially if they've used ChatGPT. My CS friend has students who don't believe him when the thing in front of them differs from ChatGPT just like my language students will not accept that the machine translation is not correct/common usage.

[wakame@tech.lgbt]

@mensrea @futurebird

That is something I should definitely try sometime.

When the broken code comes from another person, it is more "improving something" and less "getting your work dissected".

[cavyherd@wandering.shop]

@futurebird

It's probably a missing or extra comma, quote, or paren.

"looking for it in a calm, systematic way" after the requisite freak-out & meltdown....

[gregordebalzac@beige.party]

@wakame @futurebird

This comment is spot on I think. I’ve seen this with little kids and devices like iPads. When the iPad doesn’t do what they want, they will get mad and say “it’s not doing what I want” to which I have to reply “it’s doing exactly what you told it to do”.

Also, I think for most people computers are a “black box”, so when it errors students may assume they don’t have the skills to fix it.

[ligasser@social.epfl.ch]

@futurebird I'm also interested how to add LLMs to the mix: how to use them in a way we use IDEs now: we still know how to program/read code, but IDEs are so useful.

This will add another level to the me/them, where sometimes I'd want them to use LLMs, other times not.

But first I need to convince the school it's a good approach: I'm an external teacher, and as such have very little influence...

[ulan_ka@social.tchncs.de]

@futurebird give them code that is flawed and without/withbad commentary to fix from the beginning. Also to teach them that this is the default state of *any* code they will encounter in real life.