Start programming courses with HTML to get students to engage with programming languages by building off of their pre-existing, experiential curiosity.
Get at eye-level when working with students who are working in their seats, rather than standing above them to reduce intimidation so you develop good student teacher relationships.
Track the variable values of a recursive function using multiple pieces of paper to form a “stack” so that students can visualize what happens when a method calls itself and how each method call has its own unique variable values.
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 the “fence post” method when teaching Java’s substring method to help students use it accurately.
Remind students to account for corner cases while debugging because these edge cases are a frequent source of bugs and are often overlooked.
Use the playful phrasing “bracket thief” when students get a common Java error for forgetting to use a closing bracket to remind students of this error in a non-threatening way.
Show a storyboarding video clip from Pixar’s Toy Story to show students that storyboarding is a real world activity and that storyboarding is vital in some careers.
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.