On Tue, 22 Jan 2019 at 20:30, Matthew Polack <matthew.pol...@htlc.vic.edu.au> wrote: > > Hi All, > > In our growing school we're teaching Python programming for the first time > as an elective subject with Year 9 and 10 students. (Had a dabble at this > last year with 3 students in Year 11)
Hi Matthew and other readers, I wonder if you and any others here involved in classroom/group teaching might be interested in this recent presentation that I stumbled across: https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9800-how_to_teach_programming_to_your_loved_ones The section of this video which motivates me to write here is the two minutes from 19:00 to 21:00. What I find most interesting is his motivation mentioned there: he claims his procedure solves the problem of any students becoming "lost", feeling "stuck" at any particular step, not knowing what to do next, and unable to proceed without guidance. Quoting from the synopsis: The talk is based on many years of research by the Program by Design, DeinProgramm, and Bootstrap educational projects, as well as over 30 years of personal teaching experience in school, university and industrial contexts. A word of warning: The resulting approach is radically different from most teaching approaches used in universities and schools. In particular, it avoids teaching purely through examples and expecting students to develop the skills to arrive at the solutions on their own. Instead, it teaches explicit methodology that enables students to solve problems of surprising complexity on their own, whether they are 11 or 55, whether in a classroom, a training facility, or your home. Extensive documentation, material, and software to support this methodology is available for free. For anyone considering watching the whole presentation, I expect that there are many other aspects of this presentation to which people here could react negatively, for example: 1) The given title is misleading, in my opinion its subtitle would be much more representative: "Enabling students [by] example-driven teaching". 2) It recommends against Python, about this I have no opinion (except to respect the presenter's experience) and that is not why I am posting it here. 3) It emphasises functional programming style. 4) Despite possibly having an audience including skilled programmers, in the second half of the presentation the presenter does not skip quickly over the concept, but instead he chooses to demonstrate his concept by reproducing the same deliberate steps that he would use in a classroom of students with low ability. Despite all these possibly alienating aspects, and possibly others, I'm not really interested in those aspects, because they're not useful to me and so I choose to ignore them, instead focussing on what might be useful. Years ago I spent about a decade teaching undergraduate engineering students, from that context I consider this interesting and relevant. This presenter mentions that he has 30 years of of experience and commitment to teaching this subject, and considers most of his efforts a "failure" (at 02:00). Learning from such a person can save other practitioners a great deal of effort. So I felt that this was worth sharing here, I hope negative reactions or distractions don't distract from possibly useful information. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
