My students are writing their written responses to the U3 L10 Design a Digital Scene. Everything is going well except I’m having a very hard time adequately explaining what is mean by "describe the incremental and iterative development process of the program.
If anyone could share their strategies, analogies, talking points, ANYTHING I would appreciate it. I’ve done my best to explain it and have shown them some exemplars wherein student received the point. My explanation is falling short. Anyone good at explaining this? Thanks!
Sure @margaret.birch ! I play this game with students to show iteration. Students see that they have a process that works (or maybe doesn’t work) the first time around and then they go back and improve it (they TESTED the process, they REFLECTED, they got FEEDBACK from team members - those are all things that they can write about to show an iterative process in their writing of code too).
I say if students describe their OVERALL process of writing their code, they talk about the incremental process of writing code. They should tell the general story about what they did first, second, third etc. That shows how they incrementally built the program. Here are some examples from my class (note the last page I told them they needed to tweak a bit, but the first page is good IMO). When I handed student work back, I had them look at these examples to see how they are similar or different. I wrote a bit about it here too.
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Thank you so much. This was perfect timing, I actually took your advice today and got a thumbs up all around the room at the end of the explanation/activity. We’re much better off thanks to your response. I think they got it!
Hi @margaret.birch,
I know @kaitie_obryan already did a fantastic job responding to your question and I wanted to add a tidbit to the conversation.
When my students ask about this, I point out that pretty much all of them have been using an iterative/incremental process. How do they know? Well, when they created their program, did they start with nothing, just think about their code, then pound out all of their code in one go and it ran perfectly the first time? Extremely unlikely. Thus, there was some element of incremental/iterative process in there. (And Kaitie did a great job of pointing out what exactly that means.)
Frank
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