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?

Comments

You need to narrow the scope

[Anonymous Coward]

Computer basics, ie how to use the web, and computer programming do not belong in the same course. People in the audience for either will not be happy with the other.

Re:You need to narrow the scope

[Anonymous Coward]

What grade level is this on? If it's a semester long high school course, or middle school, you should get up with an experienced teacher. Even if you're teaching this at a junior/university college, you should find a licensed educator to talk to. Too often computer science teachers know a bit about programming and logic, but very little about teaching. I'ld recommend covering your major points, and focus on a very VERY simplistic program that handles a few basic aspects (Perhaps a simple calculator?) and progress through whatever technologies are necessary while stressing that programming languages are like human languages, except machine friendly. Some languages are more flowery (latin) some are more coarse (germanic) and some are very powerfully in their succinctness (some asiatics).. Finding a way to bring this out of nerd land helps normal kids not want to get you fired as badly.

1) teach background
2) teach theory
3) relate theory to something understandable
4) expound. Verify learning, and repeat. And repeat. and repeat. then move on seems to work. Half the kids are not paying attention at any given time in virtually any class.

Task based learning

[nurb432]

Don't teach things in 'the abstract'. Give them a task to accomplish that needs particular 'features'.

Then the next 'task' adds more 'features', but doesn't drop the earlier ones learned.

And don't make the tasks abstract either. "do a bubble sort" would qualify as too abstract. While "collect 5 client names from the user and sort them" wouldn't.

Computer science is hard for most people.

[gillbates]

The majority of people - even those with college degrees - have a difficult time with logic. Something as simple as an if-else construct can be very confusing to the average person at first.

And there's another twist. About 40% of learners can understand and manipulate abstract concepts, and learn them without any practical experience whatsoever. The other 60% require experiential learning - they have to do before they understand. Fortunately, computers can very easily demonstrate concepts such as if-else...

And how computers work is a mystery to most people. Before you start the course, you should come up with a simple mental model that you can use to explain how a computer works to someone with absolutely no understanding of electronics, logic, etc... For a basic programming course, you should first assess class understanding:

1. Do they know how a computer works at a basic level - files, memory, cpu, etc?
2. Do they know the difference between an application, and the files it creates ("I saved it in Word..." etc..)
3. Do they understand how to solve a problem by breaking it down into its constituent steps? Believe me, there are people that really struggle with this, and expect the instructor just to teach them to solve a particular problem, rather than how to instruct a computer to solve problems. In fact, that might be a good introduction to programming, "Computer programming is the art of instructing computers to solve problems."

For most programming courses, you should not even assume your students understand how to use the compiler. Furthermore, you should probably come up with a series of simple examples which demonstrate your point without any extraneous code. Because most people learn by doing, one of the first exercises should be to build a simple "hello world" type of application to familiarize themselves with the build tools.

And have fun! Come up with interesting problems. Your students will most likely spend most of their corporate careers doing boring stuff, so they'll appreciate the chance to do fun things like games.