Wanted: Advice from CS teachers

[aaribaud@mastodon.art]

@RogerBW @futurebird (some) C coders have a saying:

If the compiler emits an error, then your code can't run;

If the compiler emits a warning, then your code won't run, at least not the way you expect it to;

If the compiler emits no errors and no warnings, then it's high time you updated your compiler.

[wakame@tech.lgbt]

@voltagex @itgrrl @futurebird

At the university we had this maybe once.

But then, to quote a professor: "You are learning 'computer science' here. 'Programming' is something that you should either already know or learn in your free time."

[mguhlin@zirk.us]

@futurebird Maybe follow a writing workshop approach. 10 minute mini lesson, students work on applying coding concept, you conference with them individually after checking on what they are doing, group share at the end where they show their code and what they have done while others make a positive remark or suggestion. End each week or whatever time range with a culminating project that shows their knowledge of three core ideas taught. A suggestion from a writing teacher…may not work.

[oneloop@mastodon.xyz]

@futurebird It's hard to sit back and think when you're under the pressure of "do it fast or you'll fall behind". Maybe decouple the two: projector classes shouldn't be done in front of the computer. Projector classes are for you to show something, and interacting with the computer are for the students to explore, and you can't do both at the same time.

[charette@mstdn.ca]

@futurebird I take it there are no assistants in class?

I have no idea if we're talking young adults, high school, or primary. But in high school in the 1980s for grade 12 CS we had to assist in the grade 9 CS class. When a student would raise their hands, one of us in grade 12 would rush over, leaving the teacher uninterrupted.

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@charette

These are middle school kids. I don't think they need someone to rush over and help them. I want them to think about "my code won't run" in a different way.

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@charette

Like if someone offered me an assistant I'd say "that's OK." the class size is reasonable 12-18 students. I just need to help them understand errors better.

[petealexharris@mastodon.scot]

@futurebird @wakame

The thing I keep saying is: an error message is not a person telling you what specifically went wrong this time. It's a string somebody writing the program months or years ago thought would describe what they *guessed* back then might cause the code to reach that state unexpectedly.

1. Code can always be wrong, sometimes in ways the programmer hadn't thought of (in fact often since they probably handled the ways they'd thought of) and,
2. Error handling code is code.

[nini@oldbytes.space]

@futurebird When the computer doesn't do the thing when it's supposed to it can be like "why isn't the machine doing what I say?", they're not the source of the issue but the computer can be. When you're the computer, you only have yourself to fix the problem.

[recyclist@toot.community]

@futurebird Maybe a change of emphasis focussing on "getting it working" as the task, while entering the code becomes a more mechanical step that just has to be done?

[paco@infosec.exchange]

@futurebird I’m pivoting off this just to share a funny story. An old CS prof shared this with me when I was staff in a CS department at a university.

One of his undergrads had come to him with a big printed listing of their code (back when that was how you did that! It was probably FORTRAN printed on fan-fold paper). They obviously wanted him to find the problem in their code. It became clear quickly that they hadn’t done anything to debug it themselves.

He started point at various places in the listing. “Right here, add PRINT ‘I am a dumbass’. And here: PRINT ‘I am a dumbass’” and so on. “Then run it and see how many dumbasses you get.”

Now, did he really do that? Is that just how he tells the story? Who knows. But it’s funny. And anyone who has ever written code will agree that this works sometimes.

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@petealexharris @wakame

"Error handling code is code."

It had not occurred to me that a student might not see it that way "some guy wrote code to try to tell you what went wrong" but I can see how this might not be how a student might see the errors.

It's like when I realized as a kid that all books are just ... written by people. A revelation. I think I thought, on some level, books were a natural product of the universe. When I realized they could have typos, bad ideas it was so exciting.

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@paco

My students are too hard working and sensitive to deserve such things.

But.

Well, I have met other people in my life.

[zwifi@framapiaf.org]

@futurebird a teacher of mine had a nice trick for this, that I reused when teaching: he would reply "I won't help you until you have drawings of what the code should do, and comments everywhere". Having the students make diagrams (if they didn't start there) helped them find architectural issues in the code logic, and writing comments had them be their own rubber ducks, and forced them to re-read things. In a lot of cases, they figured the issue out before being ready to call ^^.

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@Zwifi

I do this with my older students and with those with more experience. This is the one course that I teach that EVERYONE must take. So there are kids there who have never programmed anything. Kids who were confused when I had them use a computer with a mouse since they'd never seen one in person before.

I'm glad we have such a course. But they just don't know enough to do this yet.

And I have an agenda: I want them to have fun.

[pitmutt@gts.zebras.social]

@futurebird @wakame I am in my 40s and I still, occasionally, spend hours trying to fix line 32.

[fortunos@monads.online]

@futurebird my student tutor had an annoying habit of answering questions like that with "try doing it right instead of wrong", which was pretty obviously just a way to not get flooded with this exact type of comment.

On the one hand, it's smarmy and unhelpful. On the other hand, sometimes it's useful to tell someone to sit down and not panic in your face so you can continue doing your thing (for their benefit)

[mcduncanlab@mstdn.social]

@futurebird

Thanks this is really helpful. We teach a graduate class on quantitative cell biology based in python. Many ppl don’t have prior coding experience, we probably need a section like this.

[jgrg@mstdn.science]

@futurebird This is what I would have suggested. Introduce the compiler, explain that you will encounter errors, but the error messages are designed to be as helpful as they can be.

(If you're using Python, error messages have been worked on over the last few major releases, with teaching particularly in mind, so it's worth using the most recent.)

[pete@mas.to]

@futurebird

Test Driven Development can help, although there are skills needed, and you can have errors in your tests!

But the skills needed to write/troubleshoot a good test are more focused/limited than being able to code

Tests also encourage you to write testable code, which is usually modular/functional, and broken code elsewhere is less likely to affect it.

Monolithic code is hard to test/debug.