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How Should I Teach a Basic Programming Course?
riverman writes "I have been 'provisioned' at the school where I work to teach a new Computer Science/Programming course. I'm supposed to be teaching everything from the very-very basics (i.e. where that myspace thing is in your computer monitor, and how it knows who your friends are) to the easy-advanced (i.e. PHP classes and Python/Google App Engine). I'm an experienced programmer, but I'm not sure where to start — I could easily assume that my students know something basic they don't. Are there any resources on the internet that could help me find a solid curriculum? What are your suggestions?"
I'm sure many of us have gone through intro-level programming courses of some sort; what are some things your teacher or professor did that worked well, and what didn't work at all?
Second that motion. I teach labs for an introductory programming class myself. The best way to get concepts to stick with students is to present them as pertinent problems or tasks to the students. Some examples that work for me are making small games (card games, dice games, etc) and writing programs that perform some kind of pertinent calculation (like business calculations or health BMI, target heart rate) calculations. All of these can be encapsulated in the task of presenting the program to the user in a nice interface..be it command line, web, or desktop GUI.
These examples don't cover everything, but what you do should work for you, your students, and the concept that needs to be transferred to the students.
It looks like an equality statement that couldn't possibly be correct. Just telling them it's "an assignment statement" doesn't seem to penetrate. I have found a mailbox analogy to work about 95% of the time.
It goes like this: You are at the post office in front of a wall of mailboxes. The mailboxes have numbers on them (you could go into memory addressing if it was appropriate, but it's probably best to leave that out unless someone asks for a little more detail). One of the boxes has a label on it: 'x'. The statement "x = x + 1" means "take the current contents of the box labeled 'x', add '1' to it, then put the result back in the box labeled 'x'"
Often, about 60% of the students immediately go, "Oh. That's pretty straightforward." For the remainder, you could have 4 or 5 cardboard boxes. Write 'x' on a sticky note and put it on a box. Write '1' on a piece of paper ... You get the idea. Seeing this very concrete representation of memory, and that the names are 'labels' on that memory, means that this thing they have been hearing about for years, 'memory', is now nothing but a bunch of boxes you can store stuff in. Simple.
You can elaborate on this by putting multiple labels on the same box, or putting special pieces of paper in some boxes that say 'don't use me, go get/set the value of some other box', thereby demonstrating pointers. You can also demonstrate type mismatches by putting a picture in a box and then ask a student what it means to 'add 1 to a picture'. Etc, etc.
This may sound like baby steps, but in 1/2 hour or less and you have given your students a real, usable model of one of the most fundamental concepts there is.
This isn't just for programming. Using pertinent tasks to teach any subject is the best way to get the knowledge to stick.