Tell your students that they should assume their code has bugs to help decrease their frustration when writing code.
When explaining code to the class, project your code and use a tablet to draw on top of it. Ask students for debugging suggestions to make them more comfortable finding bugs and to show them that all programmers, even you, make mistakes.
Misconception: when working with Booleans, students assume that false means incorrect and true means correct.
Before class, create a glossary of coding symbols on the board to help students verbalize their code during class discussions and oral exercises.
Assign students to draw a dodecagon in Scratch before introducing repeat blocks so that once you introduce the repeat block, it is clear that it is a time-saving block.
Show students what code looks like with and without switch statements to motivate the reasons for using them.
Let students debug their code alone for a few minutes before intervening because students might feel that they should be able to find bugs immediately, which isn’t the case.
Assign students to add comments to code their peers wrote that is void of comments to test students ability to understand the code as well as their peer’s ability to write clear code.