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.