Learning programming at scale • Hacker News Board

Re: Learning programming at scale

#21

Post by bobochan » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:17 PM UTC

tsumnia wrote: post #20

bobochan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks to everyone for their excellent suggestions. One of my reservations about going to an automated testing and grading approach is that the course evaluations consistently say that the personalized feedback is an important reason that they took the course. But the fact is that line by line analysis of every submission does not scale, and teaching X times as many sections means that compromises will have to be mad…

The bottom third is where I hope to see improvement with the introduction of typing exercises, lecture exercises (multiple choice/true-false/fill in the blank style questions) and also I include YouTube videos of that week's material. My logic is that like sports, you need to stretch and warmup before doing a physical activity, so the same should be applied to a new concept. If the student is still having trouble imp…

Brilliant. About 75% of our class time is spent doing exercises in class with me roaming about, or at least it would be if I could remember to stop talking at certain points.

Re: Learning programming at scale

#22

Post by tsumnia » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:47 PM UTC

bobochan wrote: post #21

tsumnia wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bottom third is where I hope to see improvement with the introduction of typing exercises, lecture exercises (multiple choice/true-false/fill in the blank style questions) and also I include YouTube videos of that week's material. My logic is that like sports, you need to stretch and warmup before doing a physical activity, so the same should be applied to a new concept. If the student is still having trouble imp…

Brilliant. About 75% of our class time is spent doing exercises in class with me roaming about, or at least it would be if I could remember to stop talking at certain points.

Smart! Before I let them loose during the 3 hour lab, I spend about 15 minutes talking about the overall plan of a specific problem. For example, during looping, they had to flip a coin 1,000,000 times and record the results. I explained how Math.random() worked and how if they did "Math.random() > 0.5" they could determine whether the coin was heads or tails.

Looking at my current scores: 9 have A's, 2 B's and sadly 1 F

Re: Learning programming at scale

#23

Post by bobochan » Sun, Oct 04, 2015, 1:56 AM UTC

tsumnia wrote: post #22

bobochan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant. About 75% of our class time is spent doing exercises in class with me roaming about, or at least it would be if I could remember to stop talking at certain points.

Smart! Before I let them loose during the 3 hour lab, I spend about 15 minutes talking about the overall plan of a specific problem. For example, during looping, they had to flip a coin 1,000,000 times and record the results. I explained how Math.random() worked and how if they did "Math.random() > 0.5" they could determine whether the coin was heads or tails. Looking at my current scores: 9 have A's, 2 B's and sadly…

I wish that I could give out those grades (except for the F, obviously). One of the drawbacks of our system is that we have to grade on a curve, particularly the number of top grades that we give. The deans can give some variation in that quota, but only in exceptional circumstances. It is hard when I am teaching an elective and these are students that are specifically choosing something very challenging when they could just as easily spend their last semester coasting through.

I have never had to fail a student, but I have had a few violations of academic integrity that had to be dealt with. One of the few upsides of intensive grading is that I tend to remember specific errors, and a flag always gets raised when I see the same error twice, regardless of how many variable names were changed, etc.