Anyone else have a ton of students who just don’t understand parameters?? This was not an issue in previous version of the course and I don’t know why or what it is but an alarming amount of my students understand everything and then get to parameters and are confused… which doesn’t make sense since parameters should be easy. In previous versions it was. And year after year with the new version of the curriculum they are confused and even the ones that “get it” don’t truly understand the concept. Anyone also have this issue? Do you supplement anything else to the code.org to explain this concept further or use a different lesson/unit progression?
Parameters are sneaky! I do find that this is the place where students who don’t have a confident understanding of abstraction really struggle. Coding seems reasonable when there is exactly one path that you can follow, but when you can write a code segment that appears to do different things, it takes a little processing to figure out how and why that works!
Sometimes I send students optional/additional work from the old turtle drawing U5 from 2017 or so. This can self-paced, and something to do over spring break if they need additional practice programming.
Beyond that, I do a lot of code tracing on whiteboards. Building fluency tracing functions with parameters then translates to more fluency writing them.
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