- Typing Tuesdays: We are going to do a 3 minute typing test every Tuesday on Typing.com. Students will track their progress over time. I am going to do this in CSA and CSP... I would love to do this in concepts but the time it would take to start up the laptops is just too much. We will see. Typing abilities are definitely a barrier to fluency of programming in my classes.
- Addressing gender inequities: I am going to bring in an article each or perhaps week to talk about culture issues in CS. (Now that I am thinking about it, I wonder if this might be a worth-while week-long event). I might have students write a reflection on what they can do to help address the culture issue. I am thinking of printing out a classroom set of these articles and having students read them as computers get started up or perhaps assigning it as homework. For example, asking questions like:
- Do you "believe" it is an issue in the tech community? Give examples from your own experiences.
- Do you believe it is an issue in our classes? Give examples.
- What can you do to fix the issue? If culture is 100% human-created it is 100% changeable.
- Why do you think we have such a huge gender imbalance in CS classes?
- Follow that up with this article about women in computing and how it used to be a female dominated industry.
- Getting student feedback. I have plans to have people gather feedback from students in my classes.
- Talk explicitly about incremental and iterative development. I think in math students are so used to linearly doing a problem. (How many times have I heard teachers talk about what "steps" are necessary to do the problem?!). Students who are high achieving in math are used to seeing a problem and then doing the exact same thing in a different problem. CS is not like that. I need to draw the similarities and differences between CS and Math. Too many students are looking at blank screens because they don't know how to do the WHOLE problem.
That being said, here's what actually happened in my classes today:
- CSA worked on labs with for loops. I need to go through those though and get rid of some weird features (like having floats as returns...) and a few other things. I wrote them down... somewhere?
- CSP we are plugging away on programming. It is going well. We slowed down to do a solid intro in top-down programming. On Monday we will do notebooks that talk a bit more about top-down programming.
- Concepts: Did a bit of review and then took a quiz.
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