hey mastodon, throw all your programming pedagogy links at me. I teach a lot of beginner programmers and I want to get better at it!
specifically the trouble I have is getting beginners from the "I understand the syntax and can modify examples" stage to the "I can model problems as programs and apply my knowledge of the language to build these programs" stage. the first stage is pretty easy and most tutorials for beginners are oriented toward that kind of literacy... the second is harder to achieve and harder to teach, and it seems like most people only reach that stage with self-directed practice
@aparrish This is the toughest. I try to make frustration and confusion more acceptable to students. Lower expectations of fancy results and appreciate that hair-tearing is part of the process. And I do a lot of iterative, code-along-with-me exercises to show how I start with something simple and slowly add to a program rather than pointing to finished examples.
