The debugging lesson gave me a good chance to look at student progress and see how well they could reflect on the code they were learning. Approaching as a no-stress check-in, I was able to have discussions with students in a way that allowed me to understand their thinking as they worked through these tasks. When students would get stuck, I could listen and ask questions to better determine why they were getting stuck. Students who generally were understanding the topic and language, were able to fly through the tasks and move on the Stage 7 pretty smoothly.
Glad to hear that the debugging went so well. I’m curious how the Web Development Practices guide is working out. Did students use it to track their bugs? Does it feel like a useful resource?
The problem with using a document like this over the course of multiple weeks is that students are prone to lose it and I need to remember to have them fill it in. We did make a list of common bugs, but I don’t know the extent to which students put them in their packet and re-used that at a later date.
Thanks, Chad. I’m wondering whether there’s another format we could support that would work better, or if the document is just hard to keep track of in any form. Would it be better online?
It seems to me that it may be a classroom by classroom situation. Perhaps offering a Google Doc version and some sort of online version could be helpful. What I may do next year is share one copy with my entire class via Google Classroom, so we can all edit the same document. Thanks to new features in Google Classroom, I could actually share the same document with small groups of students instead of the whole class. I guess I will have think about it.
Notes:
11 students, 9-12th Grades with little experience in CS.
U2L06 - Clean Code and Debugging
This was a good checkpoint lesson which students could work on independently and I used the classroom to individual meet with students. As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of students weren’t understanding the structure of the webpage ("< !DOCTYPE html>< html>< head>< /head>< body>< /body>< /html>") and typing a lot of their information in the < head> rather than < body>. So I know to really push on what goes where for next time, and this lesson gave me a chance to do so. Out of habit, I use/used comments in my code earlier in the lessons so students had been exposed to it and understood the purpose, as they saw it in practice earlier.
@bradleywellsashley What strategies have you tried for getting them to understand head and body? Those are definitely hard tags to teach because its hard to see their impact on the page.
I was absent so as a reinforcement for the entire class, I sent them to Khan Academy which doesn’t allow students to progress unless they understand the concept. Like every class, some liked that structure and some didn’t.