Skip to main content
CS Teaching Tips

Main navigation

  • Browse All Tips
  • Tags
  • 3D
  • About
  • Rate Tips
  • Tip Sheets

Use analogies to real-life things or events in order to provide students with a more concrete picture of abstract concepts.

Share Use analogies to real-life things or events in order to provide students with a more concrete picture of abstract concepts. with FacebookShare Use analogies to real-life things or events in order to provide students with a more concrete picture of abstract concepts. with Twitter
  • If the same analogies are used for a prolonged period of time, make sure to tie parts of the analogy back to the technical terms and to switch between analogy terms and technical terms. This can make it easier for students to learn technical terms.
  • Stories can be useful as prolonged analogies.

More about this tip

Tags

  • Programming Concepts
  • Development Methods
  • Meaningful and Relevant Content
External Source

Interview with Norm Jacobson

Other Tips By
Other Tips By Norm Jacobson

Similar tips

Challenge students to estimate the answer to a Fermi problem to model problem decomposition.
Use group discussion to help students figure out boundary cases for removing duplicate adjacent elements on their own so that they get to discuss a variety of test cases in depth before focusing on the code.
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.
  • CSTT Facebook
  • CSTT Twitter

For more information or to report a bug, contact us at admin@csteachingtips.org. Built with Bootstrap. Footer Icons by Mohammed Alyousfi. Powered by Drupal.

Privacy Policy

  • National Science Foundation
  • Sage Fox Group
  • Harvey Mudd College