D86: Digging deeper into interfaces

AP CSA

We revealed the Snowflake lab.  It was cool to see what happened when we brought everything together.

Then we watched this short video from my new favorite show.



This fed into talking about using the Comparable interface.  We talked about why we might want to be able to use the Comparable interface (to compare GPAs, to compare ratings of restaurants, to compare souls, etc.)

In my first hour, I had them get started on the labs that ask them to create a compareTo method that compares lengths of words, etc.  I thought we were good to go, but there was a TON of confusion.  I am learning that while I am getting good at prepping myself for the content, I am not doing a great job of anticipating what challenges students will encounter.

In the runner class, I gave students code that takes words from a file and puts them into an array.  Then Array.sort() is called to sort the array and then it prints it out.  Students were really confused as to where compareTo was called.  We looked at the documentation for Array.sort to see that when we use Array.sort it sorts the array based on the compareTo method.  In retrospect, I think I should have students tested the code themselves in smaller cases like this:

Students were confused as to where the method was going to get two different Word objects - they didn't get that the compareTo method has to be called on a Word object.

During second hour, I walked through the solution a bit more with students and it seemed to go a lot more smoothly.  We will see how the practice goes on Monday.

APCSP
Last day for the Explore for a while.  We are going to spread out the last 4 days over the next month.  I have 3 students who are done with the task after 4 hours.

Concepts
I NEED to watch my management.  Seating charts got a bit flexed today but I have my para escorting students to the bathroom when ever anyone needs to go.  That seems to help.  We are working on permutations and combinations.

One Good Thing
I was talking with a student today about what the next course in our sequence looks like.  He really wants to do something with a heavy physical competent.  It is interesting to think about what the next course could look like.