Teaching Programming Now Emphasizes Sharing

An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times explores some of the best ways to teach kids and finds that some of the new tools are encouraging the kids to share their work with each other. One teacher first tried to keep the kids quiet and staring at their own monitors but found it was better to let them copy each other. He calls MIT's Scratch a 'gateway' tool. Then the article points out that programming Blender with Python is not as hard to pick up as your grandparent's programming languages — and kids today are learning them in a few months." The Wikipedia entry on Scratch is worth reading, too.

Comments

In my experience

[slthytove]

High school computer science teacher here in my 4th year of teaching. This year, I've emphasized group programming much more than the past 3 - I used to do 50/50 group/individual in-class stuff, but this year nearly every in-class exercise is done with randomly-assigned partners in my Intro and AP courses. The difference in comprehension is astounding - students are grasping concepts much quicker than usual. The thing is, when they go off on their own to do individual assignments now, they do so with much more confidence, thanks to the discussions they were able to have with their partners.

FYI, I teach at an all-girls school, so it's possible that these are unique results for girls, but I imagine that boys would similarly benefit from working with partners.