Wanted: Advice from CS teachers

[semitones@tiny.tilde.website]

@futurebird One way I might play is have all the kids stand on a line they can't get off of. One volunteer can move freely, blindfolded, and has to listen to the group to find the treasure (usually a pool noodle on the ground).

During the game/debrief they'll almost always figure out that talking over each other doesn't work, and come up with a way to have one voice (often electing a leader).

This does not address the CS aspect of your challenge, but I hope it was helpful / interesting. (3/3)

[ancoghlan@mastodon.social]

@voltagex @itgrrl @futurebird Definitely not a standard part of academic courses. Software Carpentry workshops include it, in part by live coding the demos so the participants both see the instructor making mistakes *and* their process for resolving them. Teaching the trial & error loop also comes up most years at the PyCon AU Education Seminar (since it is far from being a solved problem)

[jhaas@a2mi.social]

@futurebird My employer at the ISP I worked for in the 90s used to say that, "Working with computers requires a huge ego. The computer is always telling you that YOU ARE WRONG."

The thing you're trying to teach is harder because it's two things at the same time: Learning how the language parser reports errors. The student learning to debug how they think.

I've been coding for years. Parser errors are hard enough and are often obscure in some languages.

[hanscees@ieji.de]

@futurebird @Pollinators to nerd snipe. Yet another concept has entered the fediverse

[bytebro@mastodonapp.uk]

@willyyam

This a brilliant 'trick' for understanding what actually may have happened.

@futurebird @wakame

[richpuchalsky@mastodon.social]

@futurebird

"The error message *tries* to help you": the error message was written by people who had no interest in helping you

[iris@neuromatch.social]

@futurebird @Zwifi how are you currently teaching that debugging is a skill and part of what they're learning? Do they take notes on, or see presentations of, how bugs (including typos) were identified and fixed? Maybe even presenting to each other the problems they each got stuck on, or debugging as a class on occasion so they can see the process in real time while they're not currently panicking?

[mistertim@assemblag.es]

Argh, this sounds very familiar, I've been trying to teach *from the very start* that encountering errors is useful - they're opportunities to learn, and to think / design in successively more detailed levels of abstraction - working "outside in" - calling methods which don't exist yet to sketch out the general shape of a procedure, watching it fail, then defining them... (1/2)

[mistertim@assemblag.es]

... This worked very well for a while, until I got a cohort who were already *deep* into LLMs who would encounter the errors, not wait for the rest of the class to catch up, paste the message into ChatGPT, and set out on confusing, frequently completely wrong paths that it was difficult to bring them back from 😕 (2/2)

[jonquass@techhub.social]

@futurebird
I've been a professional software engineer for over a decade now. I still make errors.

What's interesting is that at a certain level it's possible to write code that in isolation works exactly as you want it to, but it doesn't work in combination with the rest of the existing code.

But I also have tools to help me. My IDE checks for typos or syntax errors for me and flags them. It suggests solutions and offers to apply them. I have build tools written by other engineers to catch problems I might not have ever thought about.

No one person knows everything, but anyone can learn enough to be effective

[sandorspruit@mastodon.nl]

@futurebird I have done some classes, explicitly saying I had not prepared anything, completed the exercises improvising there and then, made some mistakes of my own and corrected them. Showing that correcting yourself is part of the game.

[iris@neuromatch.social]

@phronetic @futurebird I can imagine a classroom where there's a running list of error messages encountered, and you get a sticker or bonus points or something for finding a new one, and explaining to the class what it means once you've figured it out. These days I can get an error message and approach it with "ooooohhhh never seen that before", but in my earlier years, hah!

[wwkudu@c.im]

@futurebird What a great set of discussions and thanks for being a teacher! (They pretty much make the world go round, imho.)

I'm not one, but have taught some people coding over the years. Most recently I've seen that LLMs compound the problem you describe, because when the student has posted hundreds of lines of code to answer some fairly standard coding assignment, they have jumped so far into the deep end, that it's very hard for them to get out. The pasted code does all sorts of things they don't yet know about. Hopefully not your situation. Hopefully a lesson in its own right, but getting this young person to slow down and *do it themselves* was non-trivial.

On a different tack, a project manager I knew once said energy project needs a project teddy bear. Any coding issues have to be explained to the bear first before getting senior help. The bear apparently solves 60%+ of the issues. Apocryphal, maybe.

[rogerbw@discordian.social]

@aaribaud @futurebird When I moved from Perl to Rust as my primary language I was very pleased to find that whole classes of errors which had previously been runtime debugs turned into compile-time debugs. I am now an enthusiastic convert to strong typing.

[jerojasro@col.social]

@futurebird when I bumped on that problem with my students, I made a lesson focused on:

* provoking error messages
* reading them, learning where in stacktraces is the info about them
* correcting the error

and categorizing them systematically: oh, NameError: this means I'm using a var that does not exist, maybe this is a typo here, or a typo there when I defined it.

It helped them not panic when seeing errors and gave them tools to fix common ones on their own.

[coolcoder360@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@futurebird not a teacher, so take with a cup of salt, but maybe having them not coding during your speaking parts could help?
Like, locking their screens or all looking at you rather than typing at the machine.

My guess is that anyone calling out like that got distracted with the coding and was not strictly paying attention to what was being said, so when they get the error, they may not see or hear anything aside from the error in front of them.

[ghostonthehalfshell@masto.ai]

@futurebird

Present them or a piece of code and tell them this piece code has a problem with it and ask them to figure it out if you can find a fun thing all the better.

Have them perform a code review and look at code and say well figure out the failure modes of this piece of code.

I would actually have code refuse be part of your class.

[semitones@tiny.tilde.website]

@ligasser @futurebird i'm interested, but very skeptical as well. Before the LLM craze, I was working through the CS50 Intro to CS class that Harvard offers online for free through OpenCourseWare. Even back then, they offered a rubber duck debugging program that you could type your questions to. And back then, I don't think it did anything except quack. But today, I would be curious what it does because I suspect they would try to use LLMs.

[greg_b@climatejustice.social]

@futurebird
Teach The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming. Especially "you are not your code" and "kindness to the coder, not the code"
Managed Coder: Advice to a New Programmer https://share.google/ahp9eb3GQvBOIfo8b

Teach paired programming, giving everyone a coding/debugging buddy. This is one of the most effective ways to level set coding standards and skills. Students learn from each other. It also prepares them for more public code reviews.

[semitones@tiny.tilde.website]

@mansr @futurebird my highschool programming class was C++ based, but it was a joke. It was paint by numbers and we didn't learn programming.

The main thing I learned in that class was that Gmail existed and my classmates sent me an invitation to use it. Because he was checking his email during class time.