Require that students have paper and pencil on hand when they code to emphasize the importance of planning before writing code.
Misconception: Students may accidentally use obsolete, invalid, or non-existent elements, attributes, or properties when learning web development.
Misconception: Students may have trouble identifying errors in their code that cause elements to disappear from the page.
Remind students to spend lots of time carefully reading the free-response questions on the AP CS A exam to prepare them for this portion of the exam.
Misconception: Students frequently make errors when creating lists in HTML by using unnecessary or incorrect elements.
Ask students what they found confusing at the end of each week to identify problems so you can tailor future instruction to students needs.
Have students write pseudocode as a pre-lab exercise so they are prepared to write code when lab begins.
Have students create polygons in Scratch to help them practice debugging and reasoning about geometry.
Point out why a concept is important, useful, and interesting to show students how the content they’re learning connects to higher-level concepts.
Provide more than one solution when explaining how to solve a problem to the class to emphasize that there is never just one way to do things.
Encourage students to be careful when using sound blocks in Scratch that don’t have durations, as these blocks start sounds immediately rather than waiting until the first sound is done.
Have students translate between Java Array and ArrayList to highlight the differences between the two.
Use different methods of counting the stairs of the Eiffel Tower to explain how different algorithms affect Big-O runtime.
Introduce Big-O using iteration rather than recursion to make this important concept easier for students to understand.
Put more time into explaining content than you think is necessary because students may not retain all the material the first time you explain it.
Misconception: Students think that a “repeat 1” block in Scratch will execute the relevant script twice, where the script executes once and then repeats once.