Learning programming at scale
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Learning programming at scale
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Learning programming at scale
#2I just had a revelation while reading the OP (who describes a much more elaborate, fully-featured system)...yesterday I was teaching students (about 20) how to do calculations with Pivot Tables using Google Sheets and was struggling with the usual "well-can-you-describe-exactly-what-syntax-error-you-made" problems...and now realize that I could've just had students give me read/edit access to their sheets and I could've just cycled to their tab and corrected their problem for everyone to see on the projector.
I would love to have a code editing system that is as easy as that...I only have to deal with 20-or-so students at a time, so I don't need anything fancier than a way to manage 20-tabs at the same time. Having a way to jump to and collaborate on a student's session in the same way I can Cmt-T through a Sublime Text/Atom project would be all I needed.
Re: Learning programming at scale
#3These things look neat, but wouldn't this be teaching programming at scale? The phrase "learning programming at scale" leads to the idea of someone trying to learn how to program who is also able to repeatedly enlarge the amount of stuff that s/he is able to learn at once. That's...not really what's going on here.
Re: Learning programming at scale
#4I just had a revelation while reading the OP (who describes a much more elaborate, fully-featured system)...yesterday I was teaching students (about 20) how to do calculations with Pivot Tables using Google Sheets and was struggling with the usual "well-can-you-describe-exactly-what-syntax-error-you-made" problems...and now realize that I could've just had students give me read/edit access to their sheets and I could…
It's maybe not perfect, but can you have them working in a shared dropbox directory in class? (Or something equivalent.) Then just open or refresh the file...
IPython notebooks running on a central server is potentially another option for some languages.
edit: if you do find a working solution, please write it up and post it. I'd love to hear what works.
Re: Learning programming at scale
#5I just had a revelation while reading the OP (who describes a much more elaborate, fully-featured system)...yesterday I was teaching students (about 20) how to do calculations with Pivot Tables using Google Sheets and was struggling with the usual "well-can-you-describe-exactly-what-syntax-error-you-made" problems...and now realize that I could've just had students give me read/edit access to their sheets and I could…
I thought cloude ides like https://c9.io/ would allow to do just that. You'd be able to see/edit your student's code in real time.
Re: Learning programming at scale
#6This is very timely. For the past few years I have been teaching a programming course to small groups of beginning students, generally no more than 15. The goal is teach them the basics over the course of a semester, and we usually get there. The only downside is that it takes me about 30 minutes to review each assignment (there are two a week) and write feedback to the student. With 15 hours of grading a week, it seems hard to imagine teaching much bigger sections.
I went to a small college, so my programming courses were typically about the same size, 10-20 students. How do larger sections work in terms of getting feedback from professors? It seems critical, especially early on, to be able to understand the way students are trying to solve problems and then give them guidance how to get there. That seems to require more than "yes/no your code passed the unit test."
Re: Learning programming at scale
#7These things look neat, but wouldn't this be teaching programming at scale? The phrase "learning programming at scale" leads to the idea of someone trying to learn how to program who is also able to repeatedly enlarge the amount of stuff that s/he is able to learn at once. That's...not really what's going on here.
Also, doesn't this only work with intro materials that only have a few lines? How's this way of teaching programming going to work if the program is hundreds of lines long, across multiple files, or have more than one correct solution? The debugging time alone would go up very quickly
Re: Learning programming at scale
#8This is very timely. For the past few years I have been teaching a programming course to small groups of beginning students, generally no more than 15. The goal is teach them the basics over the course of a semester, and we usually get there. The only downside is that it takes me about 30 minutes to review each assignment (there are two a week) and write feedback to the student. With 15 hours of grading a week, it se…
Well, in my university's intro programming class, there were a couple hundred people. Grade-wise, the unit tests said it all. You didn't get personal feedback unless you asked for it. The test framework would email you the test cases and what your output was versus the expected, so a lot of times you could figure out your mistake (or bad assumption) without asking the professor.
The professor would have the grading details on the whole class so if we missed a lot of points on a particular problem, they would concentrate on that for a bit.
If you needed personalized feedback, you could ask the professor questions after class, at office hours, at the discussions section to your TA, or at the TA's office hours. There just wasn't personalized feedback based on your assignments.
Re: Learning programming at scale
#9excellent work! making students understand references/pointers has been my biggest challenge. dynamic visualizations definitely help.
Re: Learning programming at scale
#10This is very timely. For the past few years I have been teaching a programming course to small groups of beginning students, generally no more than 15. The goal is teach them the basics over the course of a semester, and we usually get there. The only downside is that it takes me about 30 minutes to review each assignment (there are two a week) and write feedback to the student. With 15 hours of grading a week, it se…
At Imperial, 3rd and 4th years are Undergraduate Teaching Assistants (get paid a little for it) and mark the exercises every week for two trimesters. It's a great system, both for the 1st years and for the older students "teaching" (had been on both sides).