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Compare variables to gym scoreboards to help students understand them and how they can be used in a game.

  • Just like with scoreboards, variables are a spot that can hold a value.
    • For example, with points, the value that the variable holds goes up.
    • In contrast, with lives, the value the variable holds goes down.

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  • Programming Concepts
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Interview with Dylan Ryder

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Other Tips By Dylan Ryder

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Spend extra time covering these three topics students have a really hard time with in Java: references and primitives, inheritance, and nested loops.
Use scoreboards to motivate the use of variables because young students have developed strong mental models for scoreboards through previous exposure allowing them to quickly understand what variables are.
Split students into groups responsible for programming different tasks in Java to create a Set game, this will allow them to learn to distributed work in environments that mirror industry.

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