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If students are worried about starting an assignment, give them an explicit first step.

  • Tell students that reading an assignment and making mental or physical notes counts as starting it.

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  • Effective Encouragement
External Source

Interview with Christine Alvarado

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Other Tips By Christine Alvarado

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Rather than taking away points, have students with sub-standard code improve it to better simulate how actual software engineering works.
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.
Empathize with students who struggled to get their code working, these students may not be ready to think about how to advance the design of their program; suggesting they refactor their code immediately after it finally runs can be discouraging.

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