D49-52: Back on the A train

This week we are back to the grind from Thanksgiving.  Admittedly the few weeks leading up to the break were rough, thus the lack of follow through but I am back on the A game, for the most part... 

CSA

On day 49I wanted to ease students back into CS.  We did a harkness problem up on the board about making a multiplication grid.  It required nested for loops which I never taught explicitly to students, but they acted like it was NBD.  

For the harkness problem, stopped the class at one point, asked them to identify who was furthest away from the person holding the marker, and then asked that person (the person farthest away) to be the scribe.  I noticed there were some people who were being left out a bit, this brought them literally to the center of the problem. 

On day 50 we started a set of labs.  Quiz on Day 52.  I am not giving re-takes on this quiz because we start arrays next which are so important that I don't want old material to take precedence.

CSP

On day XX we did the data visualizations exercise which I printed and collected from students.  On day YY we watched the human face of big data.  I think I might do it differently next year and have students respond to a thinking prompt after each section and then collect that.  This year some students didn't pay attention so I am giving them a quiz on the material and giving them the video to watch at home.  

Concepts

We started our financial math unit.  Twitter totally came through with a lot of great resources 

One Good Thing

I got drinks with another teacher after school today.  I find these one-on-one conversations with other teachers really wonderful.

D40 and D41: Introduction to Design a Digital Scene

AP CSA

Had two lab days.  I have made it my point to sit literally next to anyone who is struggling during this time.  Today a student who had CSP said we needed more creative outlets in CSA - and I agree with him.  I got some good news today that next semester may give me more time to plan out those creative outlets for CSA, which would be awesome. 

AP CSP

We had a guest speaker on day 40.  They did an "agile" activity which was great for students - the presentation itself was a little too low for students, but the activities were for sure a win. Today I introduced the Design a Digital Scene task. I'm a little nervous that I won't get the diversity of ideas as I have in the past... we will see what the final outcome looks like.

Concepts

We are still working our way through quadratics.  I am feeling the monotony start to set in for students (and myself).  So, tomorrow we will be playing trashketball.

One Good Thing

I had a student tell me "you should give yourself props for teaching a class with 40 students in it".  Yes, yes I should.

D40: Question Formulation Technique

AP CSA

Today we did two more loop problems Harkness style.  I gotta say, I LOVE this tool for teaching CS.  I have to make sure I don't over-use it, otherwise I think it will lose the novelty in class.  Right now, it encourages carefuly problem solving and allows students to make connections and collaborate.  It forces less guess-and-check which I think is important too.  #WIN

AP CSP

Tomorrow we have two guest speakers coming in.  I did a question formulation technique activity with students and I think it was helpful - tomorrow will be a good  test.  I also gave students who were further along some challenge problems for turtle programming.

Concepts

We did two desmos activities - the Marble Slides and a Quadratics Matching activity.  Marble Slides  is engagement gold.  I get concerned that there is too much guess-and-check for this point in the unit.  Careful problem solving is not a skill that comes naturally to this group, but I will say they are quite persistent!

One Good Thing

I've been really trying to stress the importance of team-ness in class.  I think it might be working - there are still some students who seem determined to dominate the conversations, but at least now I have it narrowed down to 3-5 students who I need to target more than others. 

One of my favorite analogies I used with my students was this: fold your arms.  Now, fold them the other way.  Students know it feels weird and uncomfortable - it's not wrong, but it feels not right.  I am asking them to take on a role that may feel uncomfortable.  I just want to acknowledge that it will feel awkward for some students, but that's ok.

D38 and 39: Harkness - Take 2!

Day 38: More of the same for everyone - lab time, programming, and problem sets.

Day 39...

AP CSA

This was one of those days that I did something different in every class, I saw pros and cons to each combiniation.  Here's what I would do next year.

I introduced while loops by having a student play an instance of a "HumanMachine" that could "takeOneStep".  Students had to write a for loop to get the student to walk to the door.  Students had different guess on how many steps it would take.  I had the student act it out and then we talked about how we had to guess the number of steps, and in reality it would be nice if we could just ask our volunteer to take steps until they simply got to the door.  Enter While Loops.

Ideally I would do this intro again next year, but before they watch the videos.  Students watched videos last night didn't need that set-up.

Then we went over the syntax and translated some of the M&M code into while loops (instead of for loops) to get the same result.  Next year, I think I would do 2 examples of this up on the board rather than print it out for students.  That wasn't necessary.

In one class I gave them time to do the homework which resulted in good conversations, but I wasn't sure if that was a good use of class time so I did some Harkness Style discussion problems.  Specifically we did a problem that asked them to write a method that would return the number of zeros in a number given in a parameter.  They could not turn it into a string.  That went really well.  The best thing I did with this was set expectations for the walk around.  I said each group needed to make one comment on every other group's work.  I gave examples of this:

• "I don't think this works because...?"
• "Would it be more efficient if...?"
• "Did you consider XX case...?"
• etc...

This really forced every group to make sense and question other students work.  Then they went back to their boards.  Students responded to the comments, either fixing their code or showing why the comment was incorrect.  It went really well!

Here are some images of what the board work looked like at the end of class.

These comments lead to a good discussion with the group after the gallery walk.

This one modeled style SO well!

I love these comments that the group wrote about what their program did.

AP CSP

Locking down each lesson has helped with pacing.  On Monday I am going to have a list of challenge problems for students who are ahead.  The concept of parameters is a little tricky for students, and I know the Harkness method COULD work but with 40 students it is tough to do that - I need 100 feet of whiteboard space...

Concepts

Quiz day!  I saw on Twitter that someone had students work independently, then work with a partner for 5 minutes and then finish independently.  We tried that and it helped.

One Good Thing

An Advanced Algebra teacher asked me to do Hour of Code in their class!  I am SO SO excited - that is the right group to recruit from since they will be Juniors and Seniors next year.  I am hoping this helps with enrollment, AND gets more students interested in code.