When learning in a playful context, students are less likely to be frustrated by difficulty or failure.
Have some students pretend to be robots while other students program them to complete simple tasks to practice debugging and to emphasize the importance of coding precisely.
Use examples that have nothing to do with computers to introduce new CS concepts in an accessible way.
DrJava, the Java interpreter, gives students an interactive environment to practice testing strategies in.
Demonstrate swapping variables' values by swapping the contents of two cups full of liquid; you need a third cup to swap the liquids just like you need a third, temporary, variable to swap the values.
To avoid frustrating students, give them definitions of common terms and ways of fixing common error messages in advance.
When you write a function, like (foo x), students don’t realize you can put a variable with a name OTHER than x in there, or an actual number.
When tracing through code in Java, use different colors for code that is executed in a main method versus in a class method.
Introduce “base-case” and “smaller-caller” as a helpful way for students to remember the different parts of recursion.