I have students who have previous coding experience/knowledge. Should I allow students to work at their own pace? I would require them to show me their results before moving on to the next section or lesson. How can I challenge these students without leaving the less experienced students behind? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
I did self-paced work my first year and regretted it. The new and slower students start feeling overwhelmed when they see their neighbor at lesson 5 when they are still in lesson 1. The discrepency kept increasing as we reached harder concepts.
I have students check in with me at various points in the lesson and have them stop till the others reach that point. The experienced students are tasked with helping other students if they are done or read some related material. But their down time is not much since the check points are done every few bubbles.
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I agree with @bhatnagars. The less experienced students do feel overwhelmed and very soon lose interest in the lessons/projects. Having those checkpoints definitely help. In addition to tasking them with helping their classmates, I occasionally give them additional challenges and/or allow them to have some game time. To be fair, I let all my students to breakout and play games for 5-8 minutes towards the end of class. This is definitely helping them think of new ideas they can incorporate into their projects.