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.
Tell students to experiment and break things so they maximize their learning opportunities and exposure to different aspects of Scratch to gain experience and build competency.
Have students give you instructions on how to get from the door to chair on the other side of the room to teach them to be precise when giving instructions to a computer.
Misconception: Students get confused reconciling the coordinate system with the point Scratch uses as the center for Sprites.
Start programming courses with HTML to get students to engage with programming languages by building off of their pre-existing, experiential curiosity.
Use note passing for explaining the difference between methods with no return (void methods) and methods with return to provide students with a relatable example.
Explain nested for loops using a car odometer, the innermost loop controlling the ones digit must cycle fully before the outer loops steps forward, to help students better understand nested loops through a real world example.
Misconception: The update in the index in a for loop (i.e., the third part of the for loop control statement) happens after the all the steps inside of the loop have happened.
Start by having students transpose code from one loop type to the other when teaching all the different conditionals for the AP CS A exam.