Use PEZ ® dispensers to demonstrate the push, pop, and peek methods for stacks to provide a clear and accessible illustration of these methods.
Organize an activity where students make phone calls to their classmates with the goal of summing the numbers 1 through 6 in order to demonstrate recursion.
Have a student write out detailed instructions for performing a basic task, then have another student try to follow these instructions exactly. Engaging, interactive classroom activities like this demonstrate that program instructions need to be explicit.
Give commands to an imaginary person sitting in an empty desk to model what happens when you give commands to an object that hasn’t been instantiated to help students understand null pointer exceptions.
Have students instantiate personal hall pass objects when they wish to leave the classroom to help them learn that the values passed to a constructor have to match the number, type, and order of the arguments in the method signature.
Show the class different ways nations choose their next monarch to illustrate pre-order and level order traversals as students visualize tree traversal methods.