Use group discussion to help students figure out boundary cases for removing duplicate adjacent elements on their own so that they get to discuss a variety of test cases in depth before focusing on the code.
Use active exercises in your classroom to develop a supportive culture and create a more engaged classroom that helps more students in your class develop deep content knowledge.
Allocate the last 15 minutes of class for students to share their work with each other in beginning Scratch classes because students enjoy seeing each others projects and demonstrating their progress.
Talk to students about appropriate social behavior in the Scratch community because there is a large number of people on scratch.mit.edu who connect over their projects, which provides a safe and narrow space for learning about online etiquette.
Use rotary programming - a variation of pair programming - to give students experience working with lots of different code.
Experiment with different techniques for grouping students into pairs to find out what works best in your classroom because pair programming is a great tool that can improve student’s coding skills and syntax proficiency.
Use short video lessons for middle school age students to keep their attention on the content because students struggle to focus on demos at the board at this age.
Tell students they should only give instructions when helping other students - rather than demonstrating with the keyboard and mouse - because showing instead of telling other students can cause a variety of problems.
Require that students ask two other students for help with their bug before asking you to encourage cooperation and to help them make progress learning debugging skills.
Ask students with raised hands if they’ve discussed their question with their partner before helping them because this encourages students to teach each other and helps make sure more of the students’ questions get answered.