Arrange your curriculum so that your students are doing hands-on work as fast as possible to ensure you retain as many students as possible and keep them engaged.

  • To get hands-on work as fast as possible, avoid teaching the material in a sequenced order where students learn all the foundational ideas necessary to fully understand the next topic.
  • There are a lot of concepts to learn before students really understand all the details of building programs and they can’t learn these facts all at once!
    • If you teach concepts in the order described above, it takes too long for students to get to the hands on part of class.
    • This results in a lot of student’s checking out mentally or literally dropping the course before they’ve really had a chance to experience the material.
  • Learning things in the logical order that might seem to make the most sense is not a good way to hook students on computer science.

More about this tip

External Source

Interview with Seth Reichelson