Incorporate time in each lesson for students to deliberately practice concepts and puzzle out problems to ensure your students are effectively learning.
Misconception: Students believe that in a primitive assignment, x = y could be the equivalent of y = x; they think that the computer science “=” sign is the same as the mathematical “=” sign.
Have students write a program that generates a collage of images and/or sounds. This will help them practice image manipulation and function decomposition.
Emphasize that Scratch is REAL coding; this lets students know that programming in educational languages like Scratch or Python is valuable even though these languages aren’t commonly used in industry.
Use Parson’s Puzzles to help students engage with a concept without writing code or experiencing frustrating syntax errors.
Reassure students struggling with common misconceptions that they’re not alone to bolster their confidence.
Misconception: students think that when you assign a = b, there is no longer anything assigned to b because b empties its contents into a.
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.