On Teaching Programming (GetSET 2009) (Shallow Thoughts)

On Teaching Programming (GetSET 2009)

I survived another GetSET Javascript-in-a-day workshop for GetSET 2009.

It went okay, but not as well as I'd hoped. This year's class was more distractable than classes of past years -- and, judging by their career goals, less interested in computers or engineering, unfortunate in a program run by the Society of Women Engineers.

In the morning, we had a hard time getting them to focus long enough to learn basics like what a variable was. After a caucus at lunchtime, we decided to skip the next exercise (looping over an array of colors) and spend some time drilling on the basics, and keep at it 'til they got it. It took a while but we eventually got through. We needed more examples in the morning, more interaction, some visceral way of explaining programming basics so they really get it.

They do better working as a group on a concrete problem, like the final whiteboard exercise, "How do we figure out whether the click was on the flower?". That always ends up being a highlight of the class, even though it involves (gasp) doing math. This year was no exception, but it did take a while to get through. Using variables lost them completely ("is the mouse's X coordinate bigger than or less than the flower's X?") but when we used actual numnbers and ran through several examples, things eventually clicked. "The flower starts at (2, 5) and is 200 pixels wide. If the mouse click is at (34, 45), who thinks it's inside the flower? Raise your hands. Who thinks it's not? Now what if I click at (300, 24)?" A couple of them got it right away, but it took a long time to bring the whole class along.

I'm not still sure how to use that method for more basic concepts like "what is a variable?". Perhaps some sort of role-playing? Watching William Phelps guide the girls through planet motions in our astronomy workshop Wednesday, each girl playing the role of a solar system object, inspired me. I'd used role-playing like that with little kids, but William says it works even with adults to get concepts across, and after seeing him with the high schoolers I believe it. But how to adapt that to programming concepts? A recent Slate article on teaching programming had some interesting ideas I want to try.

Printed handouts for GetSET may be a waste of time. Nobody was even bothering to look at them, despite the fact that they had complete instructions for everything we were doing. Do schools not give students printed assignments or homework any more? Last year, they used the printed exercises but not the quick reference guides; this year they wouldn't even read the exercises. On the other hand, it might be worth it for the handful in each class who really love programming. I always hope some of them take the handouts home and try some of the extras on their own.

Finally, the class would be so much easier if we could teach it on a less pointy-clicky OS! Or at least on machines where IE isn't the default browser. The first 3-4 exercises go painfully slowly, guiding a roomful of girls through many GUI navigation steps:

• Open the GetSET folder on your desktop
• Find the file named whatever.html
• Right-click on it, find Open With, and choose Wordpad
• Now find the window where you were just looking at the GetSET files (because everything on Windows tends to open with huge windows, it's now covered by Wordpad)
• Drag whatever.html into Firefox

Then the helpers have to go around the room ensuring that the girls have the correct file loaded in both Wordpad and Firefox. This took way too long with only four people to check the whole class, especially since we had to do it for every exercise. Invariably some girls will doubleclick instead of right-clicking or dragging, and will end up in whatever HTML editor Microsoft is pushing this year, or with an IE window instead of Firefox (and then the Error Console won't be there when she looks for it later).

Suggestions like "Keep that window open, you'll need it throughout the class" or "Try making that window smaller, so you can see both windows at once" don't help. The girls are too used to the standard Windows model of one screen-filling window at a time. Keeping two apps visible at once is too foreign. A few them are good at using the taskbar to switch among apps, but for the rest, loading new files is awkward and error prone.

In postmortems two years ago we talked about having them work on one file throughout the whole workshop. That would solve the problem, but I'm still working on how to do it without a lot of "Now comment out the code you just wrote, so you won't get the prompt every time, then scroll down to the next block of code and uncomment it."

I couldn't help thinking how on Linux, we could just tell them to type leafpad whatever.html; firefox whatever.html and be done. Or even give them an alias that would do it. Hmm ... I wonder if I could make a Windows .bat file that would open the same file in Wordpad and Firefox both? Must try that.

Tags: education, programming
[ 20:12 Aug 07, 2009    More education | permalink to this entry | ]