Tell your students that they should assume their code has bugs to help decrease their frustration when writing code.
Misconception: students think that when you assign a = b, there is no longer anything assigned to b because b empties its contents into a.
Reassure students struggling with common misconceptions that they’re not alone to bolster their confidence.
Use Parson’s Puzzles to help students engage with a concept without writing code or experiencing frustrating syntax errors.
Emphasize that Scratch is REAL coding; this lets students know that programming in educational languages like Scratch or Python is valuable even though these languages aren’t commonly used in industry.
Suggest that students use the “when green flag clicked” block when creating clones in Scratch to avoid exponential cloning.
Use the Online Python Tutor tool to trace through code and help students visualize what the code is doing.
To ensure equitable access in your classroom, don’t allow language reinforcing the idea that computer science is “guy stuff” in the classroom, even passively.
Beware of the expert blind spot to ensure you can help your students overcome the initial difficulties that are intrinsic to learning new content.
Make sure you are prepared to explain material in multiple ways when students don’t understand it the first time around.
Pay attention to student questions to get a sense of what topics students are struggling with and adjust your lectures accordingly.
Provide multiple deadlines for small segments of larger projects to teach students time management skills.
Encourage quiet students to repeat their individual questions to the whole class to help them feel more comfortable speaking up.
Reassure students that it’s okay if they don’t initially understand a concept in order to motivate them to keep trying.
Encourage students to use Create Your Own Block to store procedures in Scratch to help ease debugging.
Allow students to resubmit their first few assignments for the course so they can master basic concepts and be rewarded for their persistence.
Meet with students one-on-one to help them develop a Java class in order to clarify basic concepts and increase their confidence with object-oriented programming.