Eat well, sleep much

To all my hardworking students I wish two weeks of eating well, sleeping much, and enjoying the company of family and friends.

I look forward to seeing all of you next year.

Happy holidays!

The power of concentration

Lab 218 was buzzing with creative energy! Students worked hard on our “animation” programs: the bouncing ball and window-edge tracker.

To please Andres, I played no Sam Tsui today, and despite my best efforts, Coldplay kept sneaking into the mix! So Andres was pleased, and I was not.

But I was very pleased with everyone’s coding progress, and I look forward to seeing what the power of concentration will accomplish overnight.

XL for VXXX+

When I first met my students in September, I expected that no one would have a final mark below 80%—and I had two good reasons for my expectations:

1. My students are smart and hard-working.
2. While challenging, our course work is systematic and straightforward.

Alas, not every student has yet met my expectations. But with about 40 days left before the semester’s end, there’s certainly enough time for every student to improve significantly.
Of course, such improvement will require a plan; continuing as before is unlikely to yield different results.

Today, I encouraged students to form pods with their classmates—or with students in my other classes—and to formulate a Pod Action Plan for reaching VXXX+ in XL. With the help of their podmates; the online textbook; our class website, wiki, and discussion forum; telephonic and e-mail conversations with classmates; e-mail with me; and with a concentrated and sustained effort over the upcoming Christmas holidays, there’s every reason to believe that all of my students can meet my September expectations.

Follow the bouncing ball

As the skills of my students increase, they have an increasing appreciation of the work required to accomplish seemingly simple tasks. Today’s case in point: a demonstration of a simple character “bouncing”—and beeping—off window edges elicited an appreciative buzz!

Now my classes are charged with the responsibility of replicating the code which makes this “simple” task possible.

Not counting comments and blank lines, my program is only 34 lines long. I’m curious to know how many lines of code my students will need to follow the bouncing ball!

At long last!

At long last, we’ve had our second programming test, and most students did quite well.

Now, we’re looking forward to a few days of graphics and advanced programming techniques. These are always fun!

It’s a wrap!

Today, we wrapped up our three-day peer review of the programming unit.

Next week, we’ll have our second unit test and look at some advanced techniques. But for now, it’s a wrap!

Horses and water

It’s a funny thing about horses: you can lead them to water, but you can’t make them drink.

The same could be said about otherwise intelligent students: you can give them opportunities to succeed, but only those with the maturity to take advantage of those opportunities will be successful.

I’m grateful for the hard work and earnest approach that most of my students bring to the peer-review opportunity. They are real champions!

The power of peers

I’m always impressed by students’ ability to help one another master course material and by the ease with which they exchange roles: sometimes being the teacher and sometimes being the student.

Today, we began three days of intensive effort to get everyone caught up with the many skills and techniques we’ve covered in the programming unit.

Thanks to the power of peers, I’m confident that soon everyone will “be the four!”

The pace is increasing!

As we cover more and more topics in class, we’ve got the skills and knowledge to work more quickly and cover more ground. But as the pace increases, some students are starting to feel the strain. Of course, the pace is also increasing in other classes, so for some the strain is even greater.

This means that now’s the time for students to take stock of their individual situations and make responsible choices—about extra-curriculars, attendance at extra help, allocating time across subjects, and sleep!

Some students have the ill-defined strategy of catching up over the Christmas holidays. But if appropriate measures aren’t taken before classes end for the calendar year, students may find it hard to use vacation days productively.

I encourage all students who feel like they’re being left behind to have a serious chat with me. Together, we can prepare a plan for keeping up with the class— even as the pace increases!

Big face

My super students gave me big face today: I returned after a week’s absence to a glowing report from the Guest Teacher who was mightily impressed by their courtesy, friendliness, and hard work.

I was so happy to return to school today! Thanks to all of my students, and especially to the Student Hosts, for giving me big face!

It’s been a tough week

It’s been tough, being away from class for an entire week.

I look forward to my return on Monday: students have been working hard on the substring assignments, and I’ll be pleased to see what they’ve learnt!

There’s more than one tool for every job

As we develop our skills as programmers, we hope to improve the quality of our work. When I look at my earlier projects, I’m always surprised to realize that there were easier, simpler, or more refined solutions than the one I had thought perfect at the time!

One common mistake is to over-use a tool or technique. The old saying is that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail! I’ve seen the truth of that this week: Some students have turned nearly every assignment into one of selection, even when selection wasn’t required. Others, who have mastered the if statement, have used it wherever selection was required, even if [grin] case would have been an easier, simpler, and more refined choice. And still others have made their selection based upon highly detailed criteria, when more general criteria would have worked just as well and been much easier to code and understand.

Of course, my hard-working students have really only just begun their journey into programming, so it’s both understandable and to be expected that they’re still learning that there’s more than one tool for every job.

You don’t have to be a Lunatic

Some students are struggling with the current set of assignments, and that may be because they’ve forgotten that we’re trying to develop an ability to break down a problem into small, ordered steps. Our course isn’t about Turing (as great as it is!), but about “problem decomposition.”

Whenever students encounter a programming roadblock, I recommend as follows:

Write out, in English, the instructions you would give to the Lunatic (see Don’t drown the Lunatic!, 25 November 2010) to accomplish the task. Now, follow those instructions with paper and pencil.

Did you get the desired result? If not, your instructions are incomplete, vague, out of order—or all three. Rewrite the instructions and test them again with paper and pencil. Keep going until you get the desired results. Then, translate your English instructions into Turing.

You don’t have to be a Lunatic to be a programmer, but it helps to know one!