Show students the “What Facebook Knows About You” video to help them better understand their digital fingerprint.
Have students compare two hypothetical job candidates using their resumes and social media profiles to discuss issues that impact online presence and searching for jobs.
Misconception: When a variable is on both sides of an equal sign (i.e., x = x+1), students can get very confused.
Use tupperware containers and act out being the computer to teach students how in CS variables and statements like x=x+1 are different than variables and equations in math by creating a meaningful visualization.
Integrate readings from the Blown-To-Bits book and related writing prompts into your introductory CS curriculum to engage students critical thinking skills on tech and current events.
Match grammar constructs of nouns and verbs to classes and methods to help students understand what goes into a class because this helps make this difficult object-oriented programming construct easier to understand.
Use a number-guessing game that pushes students to use binary search in a fun and interactive activity that allows you to introduce binary sort in a grounded manner.
Use physical footprints and fingerprints as a metaphor to different types of imprints students make online because understanding their online presence is important.
Have students make a multiplication table to practice working with 2D arrays, nested loops, and abstraction using a data construct they’re already familiar with.
Introduce the mnemonic “Burger King Makes Great Toast” for memorizing the order of data sizes “Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, and Terabyte” to aid students remembering this information.
Have students sort playing cards to teach concurrency and illustrate the power of work that happens in parallel using a hands-on activity.
Use descriptive variable names to model good naming practice so that students learn the value of descriptive names.
Show students recursive code when teaching induction to help them learn to reason about solving induction problems since this topic confuses many students.
Show code where the name of the method’s actual arguments and formal parameters are different so students see first hand that these two items don’t have to match for code to execute and improve their understanding of scope.
Show students many examples so they see that Java passes arguments by value to help improve student understanding of scope.
Empathize with students who struggled to get their code working, these students may not be ready to think about how to advance the design of their program; suggesting they refactor their code immediately after it finally runs can be discouraging.
Alert students working with csv files about removing different types of white-space because students don’t always expect to need to remove white space.
Provide students opportunities to analyze ethical dilemmas beyond their personal beliefs or preferences to ensure students get exposure to a wide variety of perspectives.