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 We had a whole class in my electrical engineering undergrad that tried to teach that, but mostly failed at it. I think project-based work, where you give people progressively larger and larger problems to solve, is pretty much the way to do it.
The principle from the class I alluded to still applies: abstraction and synthesis. Students must abstract a problem and then synthesize that into the relevant language concepts
@aparrish One thing that I'd be interested to try is a daily whiteboarding excercise. So students only do the abstraction part and you do it as a group for like the first ten minutes of class every single day.
If you look at it at two skills it's the abstraction that's usually the harder part than the synthesis, so I think just working those abstraction muscles through daily calisthenics is the way to go.
@aparrish So like the input of the exercise would be some problem. The output would be a HYPOTHESIS as to how you MIGHT model it in code. But don't bother digging in and falsifying. Just move on. One hypothesis a day. Maybe at the end of the class review them all and self-critique?
